"Black Boat", 1999, 150 x 450 x250 cm, at Big River:
International Artists Workshop, Grande Riviere, Trinidad
(Click on the Image above for an enlarged
view)
That a distinctive site such as this influences and directs the efforts of the sculpture, reinforces Sundaram's affinity with minimalism (the significance of environment). Primary structure, another minimalist credo, informs his assembled structures - a house, a container, a boat - which attempt to define ideas about shape, scale, enclosure and render the space dynamic.
VS: The work started as debris resurrected. Finding the location was almost as important as the work. Incomplete habitation, a framework and support for the fragile/phallic black boat. The fit at many levels was perfect, the skeleton let in the air everywhere, the house had no walls, only the sea. A found object, a discarded rotten boat - I ripped it further apart, leaving its spine, which was a tree-trunk, and some of the ribs. The very strong expressionist lines, the linear quality of the work make it look like a drawing. The jagged lines have similarities to some of my charcoal and engine oil works.
KK: An aesthetic of 'dissident'
construction prevails, attention to the rough handling of surfaces is deliberate,
a sort of organic/ecological quality of the larger bio-region is cultivated.
This interacts with the architectonic composition implied in the installation.
Strata, fissures, erosions are suggested, a somewhat tenuous, crumbling
structure evoked.
The arc-like trajectory
of the black boat, poised above the sand floor, makes its gravity-defying
balance visually explicit, even as it seems to provide a sense of protective
'shelter' to the shrine-like cluster of driftwood, calabash, pods and bottles
underneath. On the other hand, is this more carefully calibrated cluster;
evenly spray-painted white and looking like bleached bones - left behind
at Grande Riviere - some sort of formal experiment, a playful 'misuse'
of organic/found objects. their transformations a search for materials
that may yield archaic, mythic associations?
VS: The calabash, bottles,
driftwood that make up the skeleton on the sand floor are a bit literal,
but I felt the sand floor needed an image and form. I was not expecting
the organizers to carry this load to its second location: the National
Gallery of Modern Art at Port of Spain. If I was thrilled at my site at
Grande Riviere, then you can imagine what Black Boat felt when it
met 'Black Anchor' (a readymade: a real object placed in the courtyard
as museum showpiece). The marriage was instant: BB struck a bull's eye.