‍

<h1 class="left">Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran considers himself a man of science and fact. Ordinarily, such a description rarely poses a conundrum. But when the subject in question happens to be a contemporary artist whose figurative sculptures are representations of mythological figurines dotting the doorsteps of temples across several South Asian cultures, speculation has come to be expected.</h1>

<h1 class="left">Of gnarly, picket-fence teeth, saucer-wide eyes, bodies bent into contorted shapes, and a riot of colour, Nithiyendran’s sculptural work invokes the beastly, monstrous quality of mythical, guardian demons placed in public spaces in India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia to ward off the evil eye. He gives expression to the imaginative and the fantastical, building on lore that’s cross-pollinated over time, and seated itself firmly in the crevices of culture. His interest in these fearsome figurines of protection, however, is far from religious. In fact, he is more concerned with the global histories and languages of figurative representation, and with politics relating to idolatry, monuments, gender, race, and religion. He is a man of fact, after all.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">The Tamil-Sri Lankan artist, raised in Australia, wears his curly hair long. His sartorial choices, like his work, erupt with texture and tell a distinctly South Asian story of maximalism. He has had his signature polychromatic, sculptural work showcased in museums, festivals, multi-art centres, and the public domain, including presentations at the National Gallery of Australia, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Dhaka Art Summit, Art Basel Hong Kong, and Dark Mofo festival, with his largest exhibition ‘Idols of Mud and Water,’ to be presented at Tramway in Glasgow later this year.</h1>

<h1 class="right">In this conversation with dirty, he discusses everything from his interest in the history of sculptural practice and the eternity of his materials, to the morbid and the mythological, and his fascination with the otherworldly. All while maintaining a very pragmatic view of death.</h1>

‍

‍

<h1 class="left">Meghna: Let’s begin with some insight into your work–could you describe your art for us?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ramesh: I think when people ask me to describe my art, it’s always a challenge, you know, because I’m doing it every day. And something you’re so close to is often hard to describe in objective terms. I’m essentially interested in figurative sculpture, primarily out of ceramics, but I also work with a range of materials, including bronze. I’ve worked with fibreglass, I’ve worked with LED lighting. I’ve worked with large-scale ephemeral sculpture, and with water. When I make work, it’s sometimes important for me to say what I’m not interested in, and what I’ve never really been interested in is photographic realism or making artwork that reflects life in a way that empirically reflects life. I’m not interested in mimicking what we’re able to see in the world, and that links to my philosophy around art and culture, in that it’s a really powerful way to visualise and speculate upon alternate narratives and different ways of being. And I think that’s why my work privileges imaginative processes. A lot of the time I’m looking into mythology, and narratives where figurative representation has some kind of fantastical, otherworldly, zoomorphic dimension to it. But with that said, I’m also interested in the politics of the here and now, as well as histories and symbolism, and how those things have emerged differently.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Meghna: What does a regular day at your studio look like?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Ramesh: I now have a studio in the Inner West in Sydney, and it’s a kind of warehouse-y style studio. I have a kiln, and I make most of my ceramic works there. It’s a small team. A lot of what I make has a collaborative dimension, not in terms of artistic collaborations, but I often work with different technical collaborators. The foundry I work with is called Malwood Foundry in Melbourne, so I make all my bronze sculptures in Melbourne. I also work with industrial designers, with lighting designers, with a whole range of people who I’ve built relationships with over time. Often the works are quite labour-intensive, so they might seem quite expressive and exhaled, but they’re highly technical. If I were to give you a visual, it’s unglamorous, it’s dusty, it’s messy, it’s things wrapped in plastic. It’s in an industrial area. I have a very physical making practice that’s quite energetic. It’s quite fast-paced, I would say, even though it’s highly technical and labour-intensive. I privilege the creative process as a way of learning and experimenting with ideas. So I’ll never kind of come up with a very specific idea and make it. I’ll start with a bit of a framework and see what ideas might emerge through the process of beginning.</h1>

<h1 class="left">Meghna: How did your interest in art develop?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ramesh: I think there were two things. One, I loved making things ever since I was a child. I’ve always loved scribbling and being creative, whether it be in an art context or the kitchen, or anywhere. I loved the actual doing of it all, I love working with materials. And secondly, I think growing up, I never really had much of a sense of belonging within my family. I always felt like my opinions were different from everyone else’s. My interests were different. I was never very conventional as a male, and I didn’t fit in within this migrant South Asian background that I felt I’d been transplanted into. I don’t know how my views developed, none of my family were into art. But I think what it really gave me, growing up, was a sense of belonging. That’s when I learned about art. I felt like I was learning about people who challenged the dominant ideas of the time, which was inspiring to learn about because I didn’t feel any sense of connection to my immediate family or community context. I’ve always been interested in colour, expression, gesture, a sense of what’s excess, or maximalism, although the South Asian idea of maximalism differs from a Western one. I love to learn, and learning about art demands thinking that’s quite advanced. A lot of the time, it’s not just about aesthetics. There’s a high level of looking at culture, looking at speculation, looking at imagination. There’s a lot of inference, then there’s history, there can be science. It was always very engaging to me.</h1>

‍

‍

<h1 class="centre">Meghna: Are learning and research also what drew you towards understanding sculptural practice from a fantastical and mythological context, as practised in South Asia?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Ramesh: I’m primarily interested in, from an intellectual and aesthetic standpoint, sculptural practice that has emerged from religious discourse, whether it’s Hindu, Buddhist, and to a lesser extent, Christian. But it’s interesting. When you talk about Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian sculpture, you see that at lots of different points in time, those narratives cross-pollinated, and you have specific sculptural discourses that are reflective of various religions, various ways of being, and various ways of thinking. And something that really inspired me was when I read an article, which spoke about how the indigenous Sri Lankan practices of Buddhism involved Hindu deities as well. As contemporary artists at the moment and as an industry, people are interested in what regional means and what a regionally specific narrative is. When you’re researching vernacular sculpture, particularly from South Asia and artworks that were made not with the intent for white cube or museum spaces, but for cultural practice and everyday life; you see that what is deemed to be regionally specific sculptures, reflect multiple regions through trade, cross-pollination, and schools of thought merging. </h1>

<h1 class="centre">My personal beliefs, however, are primarily secular. I wouldn’t even say that I was agnostic. I don’t have any belief in things that are magical or mystical. I believe in science and am very fact-based. Most magic for me is in my belief about how art and culture enrich societies. It creates people with better minds. It helps with free thinking. It helps with well-being. And I think all of these things are somewhat magical, the fact that we can engage with these aspects of culture that are made in these speculative, nonlinear ways that link back to history and can have experiences that are somewhat beyond reason. But my personal relationship with the mythological discourses that I’m exploring or looking into, I would say are intellectual and cultural rather than personal or religious.</h1>

<h1 class="left">Meghna: It’s interesting you say that, considering your work delves so deeply into the mythical. It would seem to many as though you’re someone who engages in mythology, aside from it being an intellectual practice. Were you brought up with religion, then?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ramesh: I wasn’t in a religious household as such. My parents came from Hindu and Catholic backgrounds, but they weren’t particularly religious. I did go to church until I was about nine. I remember being very little, and being quite scared of going to the church because when I would go, on the walls there were these paintings, narrative paintings. I think they were in panels. There were two. One was Jesus being nailed to the cross and taken down as pretty much a dead body. And then the other one was the Pietà sculpture, which was Mary cradling her dead child. And I always remember finding those images really frightening because they were literally violent, you know what I mean? But being frightened is still a form of fascination. I was still interested in those images and the sculptures, and they were still elaborate.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Meghna: Do you suppose this fascination with the fearsome and the morbid is evoked in your art? Your figurative sculptures are contemporary representations of guardian figures installed in temples to ward off evil spirits and negative energies. To those not acquainted with South Asian sculptural streams, these monstrous figures may appear frightening to look at.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Ramesh: Growing up in a country that was recently colonised by the British, the figurative sculpture in public space in Australia is quite evil. We have a sculpture of Governor Macquarie who ordered a massacre of indigenous people. I think it’s very interesting that a mythical, monstrous figure that’s warding off evil spirits can be seen to be scarier than something that memorialises ethnic cleansing. I think it’s important to provide audiences with pluralistic ways of looking at art and histories that are diverse, for example. That’s something I look to do. But I think the other element, which is also more pop cultural, is that we grow up with ideas of monstrous figures as children and they’re everywhere. This language is embedded in our cultural vernacular in ways that we don’t even realise; in movies, in books, but then something happens. We grow out of them as adults. It’s just that when we locate it within a South Asian context, it has a very rich history that’s quite ancient, it’s civic, and it’s still practised. For me, it’s about how to frame a place of civic importance or cultural importance, to protect art. And how some of these narratives can come to play within the stream of sculpture that I make.</h1>

<h1 class="left">Meghna: Speaking of narratives that interest you, you discussed the cross-pollination of beliefs and ways of thinking before. Do you believe that ideas of morbidity and mortality also merge across cultures?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ramesh: When we’re thinking about cultural studies, we tend to avoid words like universal. This whole idea that there are universal experiences is something that we’re trying to question, but in some capacity, death is a universal experience to humanity. I have not yet garnered eternal life. Death is linked to a whole range of cultural movements as well. And that’s interesting to me because that’s verifiable. You can produce data on those things because you often see that certain cultures have mythological narratives around death that have a very specific societal function. It helps with mourning, it helps with grieving, it helps with remembrance. And then you kind of move on. I like to think about death from a more cultural perspective. How dying, this idea of an end of people, of things that have finite lives, individually, and collectively, affect how we perceive the world.</h1>

‍

‍

<h1 class="centre">Meghna: And what is your personal philosophy surrounding death?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Ramesh: In the materials I use in my art, fired ceramic, cast bronze, there’s an element of eternity to those things. Unless you smash a ceramic and grind it to a pulp, it’s going to look like how it was made forever. Unless you put an angle grinder to a bronze sculpture, it might patinate or oxidise in relation to some elements of the environment, but it’s going to last longer than humans. But when I think about death, my view of it becomes quite pragmatic. I don’t care to philosophise too much about it at the moment because I think once I age, it’ll feel a bit more impending. But something that I do think about at the moment is ageing. And I think ageing and death are interlinked. In December I’ll be thirty-five. Your body becomes different from recent memory. Like, I’m literally grey now. My beard is visibly grey. Those kinds of little symbols make you think about mortality in a real, kind of lived way. And I understand that I’m not going to be able to make what I want to make all the time because of the limits of corporeality, which is the ageing body and then death. And then the ageing body is also the ageing mind. Like if, for example, if I have an injury or a neurological condition where I can’t process information, what happens to the art? Those are the things I think of when I think about death.</h1>

<h1 class="left">Meghna: You spoke of the materials you use in your work, their eternity, their transformative quality. Can you tell us a little more about that?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ramesh: When you think about ceramics, essentially, or clay, it’s prefaced on the transformation of earth, fire, and water. There’s earth which has an element of water in it and other minerals, and you’re creating a fired ceramic sculpture through the introduction of fire and other elements. So there’s a real kind of elemental sense to it. I don’t like using the word primal, but I mean to say ‘prime’ rather than primal. That idea that you’re working with these incredibly base elements as we’ve been doing since the beginning of time. I think that’s why clay and raw earth have such a presence in various regions’ mythology because it is about these fundamental elements being transformed in different ways.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Meghna: Is there a piece of art you’ve made that you hold closest to your heart, one that comes together as a representation of all the discussions that interest you?</h1>

<h1 class="centre">Ramesh: I think one piece of work that really embodied a lot of the discussions is a bronze figure that I’d made. I didn’t make it for any context. It was because I’d always wanted to make this figure. It’s a double-sided bronze figure. That work was shown in a fair, which is not the most critical context, but at the same time it gave shape to a lot of the dialogue I was having in my mind. I was thinking about this idea of a double-sided guardian figure. I was thinking at the time, about what it meant for life to be modelled from the earth, what that could look like, and what that could mean. And I love this metaphor of transformation in my work. This idea that earth, fire, water, and then metal come into this narrative and that we could make bronze look like wet earth, and at the same time make it look like stone.</h1>

<h1 class="left">Meghna: Lastly, how do you wish for your art to be perceived?</h1>

<h1 class="left">Ramesh: It’s funny because I think people’s perception of what my art is and how it’s made, and what’s behind it are two very different things. I often say that with the material, the aesthetic of freedom, looseness, expression, irregularity, and polymorphism, all those things are highly constructed aesthetics. And to actually make something feel expressive and wild is quite a curated process. You have to think very carefully. How do you make something feel rudimentary? How do you make something feel colourful? How do you make something feel wild? How do you make something feel like it’s been made by someone in two seconds when it was six weeks? And I think that tension is what I’m interested in while describing my work. It’s that tension between being highly considered but at the same time highly expressive and intuitive.</h1>

‍

<h1 class="left">Ramesh is represented by Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore, and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai</h1>

<h1 class="left">Photographer: Alexander Cooke</h1>

‍

‍

‍