Objects found and made

Prithpal S Ladi was out of the art scene for close to a decade. But he’s back. Gargi Gupta visits a solo show of the artist from Shillong

The day before the opening of a solo show is not really the best time to meet an artist, especially not if it is his first in nearly eight years. All around us in Gallery Threshold, hammers are banging away and drills are whirring as workmen put the finishing touches to the pedestals on which Prithpal S Ladi’s sculptures will be displayed. But none of it seems to bother Ladi. He’s not just easy to talk to, he’s also surprisingly forthcoming about his art and it’s roots in personal tragedy.

 

But to go back a bit. Ladi, now 53, “used to be quite the shooting star when he appeared on the horizon around a decade ago”, to quote Tunty Chauhan of Gallery Threshold, with many of his quirky sculptures like “See Through” (a large installation in fibre-glass and broken tubelights which showed at the British Council, Delhi in 2001) creating a stir in art circles. But since then a succession of deaths, illnesses and ugly law suits involving his family have so traumatised Ladi that he has had little time or inclination for art.

Until a few years ago, when he began fiddling around with forms again to amuse his young son. Some of what he did then are included in the show — the ethereal “Jewel Insect” series made from bits of metal fused with tiny bulbs, broken whisky bottles, test tubes and pipettes from chemistry labs, crystals and cut-glass baubles from chandeliers and semi-precious stones from his father’s collection.

The death of his father, indeed his life itself (a Partition-time immigrant, Santok Singh set up a large jewellery business in Shillong, lost it to Morarji Desai’s gold control orders, then set up a hotel which was fraudulently snatched away by a relative, before finally, in the autumn of life, starting a saw mill which too was taken away by the government) seems to have awakened in Ladi a consciousness of the absurdity of life, a feeling he objectifies in the impossibly suspended plumb lines that form a running thread through all his works at the show. “A thread you would expect to hang straight down, but this one is stretched at an angle as if defying gravity,” he says, pointing to a sculpture titled “Beckon”.

Ladi is, of course, a magician with found objects. “I love to give a second life to objects that no one can think any use for,” he says, “like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead”. In “Type Muskan” (an older work, sourced from a private collection for this show), he transforms an antique “Mercedes” typewriter. Made with his son in mind again, this work illustrates a moral tale that Ladi made up for the little boy, then three years old, on peace and the dangers of deforestation.

It’s in fibre-glass again, moulded into over-sized scraps of a notepad that go up in scrolls framed on the wall, with the animals etched into the flat surface of the “page” or rising out of it in a kind of relief to tell their jungle story.

Animals, elephants especially, have always abounded in Ladi’s works. It’s hard to miss nature if you grew up and live, like Ladi, in Shillong, and one can almost discern in the twisted and bloated cubes and pillars of works like “And Look Who Walks The Ramp”, “Judicious”, “Left”, as also “Beckon” and “Stalemate” the thick trunks of the tall evergreen trees that Ladi may have seen on his many treks in the hillside.

But more than anything else, it is absence — the imprint left by loved ones who are no more - that Ladi tries to resolve and give form to in his sculptures like the “Congress of lesser beings” (an elegiac mise en scene installation of a long-gone cobbler’s seat, his anvil run over by an anthill and creepers) and “Replotted” (a human figure trying to hold down a fossilised butterfly) - in his trademark medium of fibreglass painted in metal tones.