Badarpur (Haryana) : The eyes take some time to adjust to the dark basement of an art gallery here that smells strongly of coal. The sound of dripping water far from a distance adds to the eeriness that some suspended-spine-like figures have generated with their shadows falling on the ground, creating uneven patches.
With time, eyes adjust to the darkness and ears to the melancholic sound of dripping water, but this ambiance successfully recreates the extreme environs of a cold mine many miners across the world are accustomed to as a part of their job.
Photographer and artist Samar Jodha has depicted the life and habitats of miners from the north east in an exhibition “Outpost” that has already been displayed at the prestigious 2013 Venice Biennale.
Best known for his passion to highlight the issues of marganalised communities and conflict issues, it was during his several trips to northeast India that he saw how the miners had made houses out of tin sheds and metal scraps and live in deplorable conditions.
Awestruck by this architectural intelligence, Jodha started photographing their homes and after he came back to Mumbai he had the clarity of subject, but wanted to give it a “universal language”.
“I didn’t want to put up a photography exhibition. I wanted to give it a shape. So I went to the scrap yards to look out for metal, copper and brass. I brought in skilled labour to work on the theme and create some
structures that could resonate with what I had photographed,” Jodha told IANS in an interview.
And it was then he, along with the skilled labour, got involved in a labour-intensive process that required metal to be first cut and then oxidised with ingredients like lemon , vinegar and then scrape it with coconut shells or any other organic material.
“We would then leave this metal out in the open and let Mumbai’s salt and air react to it,” he said.
This process was important because the colours these metals took to reflected the state of tin-houses in northeast that would be exposed to continuous rain and withering weather conditions which would lent them different colours or corrode them.
“We left these metals to the nature to take its own course,” he said.
It took almost a year for the artist to finish the objects as per his satisfaction. But throughout, Jodha made it clear he would retain the rawness of the metal in order to maintain its organic existence.
After the oxidisation process, Jodha pasted printed images of the photographs on the metal to recreate those houses on these huge frames. He would then scrape off the print at some place to suit the needs of the work.
The effort has paid off incredibly as the artist successfully recreates those homes on different metals – copper, brass and metallic steel.
Jodha started his career as an advertising photographer and has now become the voice of the invisible through his thought-provoking works, something many artists don’t even dare to venture into.