Tree Tales and Terrestrial Sites
Dense foliage wraps itself around gauzy concrete walls, stairways hang in the air leading nowhere, an expectant sky is pierced by domes that could interchangeably belong both to ruined temples and modern laboratories, birds in the sky mirror blades of grass, and water that threatens to submerge all these begins to feel like the air through which the world breathes. In Tree Tales and Terrestrial Sites, Sham Sunder brings to us the argumentative porosity of the ecological, architectural, psychological, political and spiritual at once. Here everything is seen as it itself, but when seen for long enough begins to appear as a shadow of all that surrounds it. Except these shadows are formed not by an exacting sun, they pass instead through a fine mesh of memory, desire, fear, longing and imagination.
In both his etchings and woodcuts Sunder is able to align somewhat alchemically his material process and the aesthetic world of his images. Just as acid digests metal to produce voids that become crucibles for ink, Sunder’s images take us into voids like stepwells, spaces between branches, empty door frames and dark night skies. Here emptiness is not bereftness, it is rather a vortex through which the world and our consciousness must pass. A pilgrimage into these pigmented gaps rewards us with images of places that levitate between ruins and blueprints.
Display Images at 1 Shanthi Road
Etchings
Woodcuts
Previous Print Work
