'Brutal, urban' steel plants

Alex Davis combines hard and soft in his forthcoming collection “Hyper Blooms”. Rrishi Raote is struck by the contrasts

This is gimmicky,” one thinks at first. After all, these pieces amount to flowers rendered in folded and coloured stainless steel, at various scales from tabletop to wall-size. Then there are the adjectives the designer applies: “Urban, restless, brutal and glamorous.”

But Alex Davis’s steel plant forms grow on you. The words ring true. “Flowers are normally considered fragile and delicate,” he explains on the phone, with the loud sounds of his workshop as background — he’s in a frenzy of preparation for his show at Delhi’s Visual Arts Gallery next week. And yet, he says, “there’s a certain rawness to a flower”. He has tried to capture this dichotomy in steel.

 

One of the more striking forms is an enormous rose, made of a sheet of stainless steel doubled over and folded round and round, and tinted red. “You fold any material like that,” Davis says, “and you’ll get a rose. The bloom is exaggerated, hyper, not really pretty.” Hence the name of the collection, “Hyper Blooms”.

“It’s metro, but not in a New York way,” Davis says. “It’s metro like our metros.” Which is why, perhaps, his shop, Indi Store, is located in the urban village of Shahpur Jat.

Why steel? “Because as a medium steel is very modern. Brass and copper are traditional. Steel gives me the freedom to experiment. Also, I like the neutral colour. Third, it is treated as an engineering, architectural material. I want to use it as a canvas.”

Steel is difficult to work with, David says. “I have to use high-tech methods, but I finish it by hand.” The colours are a “transparent pigment” applied in layers on the surface.

How do his patrons use these peculiar artworks? “A lot of the times you get surprised by how it’s used. I was walking on a street of Paris, and there was a shop with a live flower arrangement — they had combined real and [my steel flowers]. It was quite unexpected.”

Corporate clients have picked up on Davis’s useful combination of steel and plant forms. A 30-ft-tall piece, “The Champa Tree” was installed in an indoor atrium, and Davis is now working on another such commission.

“Hyper Blooms” will have 12-15 pieces, the designer says, and not more than nine of each. The larger pieces will be priced at “a few lakhs”.