Marine art

ARTWALK

It's difficult to characterise Subodh Kerkar's work. He collects mussel shells, for instance "" not a few, as you and I might, or even a few hundred, as some mad collectors could, but a few hundred thousand.

He then works them into an installation for his "land art", almost inevitably on a beach, where he will use them to create "waves", using the light insides and the darker outsides of the mussel shells to create a play of light and shade.

So he's an installation artist? Er, yes. But he's also a painter, sculptor and, for want of another description, product designer. The only things that link these works is the sea.

Kerkar only ever works on motifs of earth and sea (as we saw at his outing at Delhi's Gallery 302), and those of the earth are so few as to be insignificant.

For all that, Kerkar started out as a doctor, even ran a hospital for six years in his native Goa. But returned to the craft he had learned at his father's knee "" painting.

His father was an artist, and like him Kerkar soon developed the art of realistic work that he'd flog to tourists. "I used to walk on the beach with my father and watch the changing colours of the sea through the day."

Twenty years ago, when he "recovered very fast" from his practice of medicine, Kerkar switched to full time painting. "The museums of the world were my classes," he says.

They must have served him well enough, for Kerkar's dedication over two decades has borne rich pickings. There's an evasive texturing to his paintings that creates different levels of gaze for the viewer. But he's moved far beyond just canvas, working with materials that communicate the language of the seas.

Whether it is glass cut and shaped to resemble waves (and with lights inside that capture the changing colours of the sea) or old wood boats that have been bought and cut up to double as his sculptures, to mild steel that he's turned into wall lights that resemble the fin of a shark, he's remained grounded (!) to the sea.

"I love exploring the memory of materials," he explains, "the joints and joineries and ropes and worn out wood of boats." The sea, he says, is never static but is "always churning out ideas".

It is this inspiration he has used in his installations as well, installations that sometimes stretch as much as a half-kilometre long. Or at least one forthcoming one in Dubai will, for which Kerkar will be carrying ten old boats from India specifically to create the installation. Why boats? "Because of their memories," shrugs Kerkar, "but also because each one of them is different."

His Kerkar Art Complex in Calangute, Goa, consists of two spaces, one of which is his studio, the other a gallery where works by other artists are shown every fortnight.

"But what I really want to do is create an anthropological art museum for boats," he says, because the old wooden ones are becoming extinct, replaced by newer, cheaper fibreglass models.

His one break from the sea might be an installation he has planned for 2008, to consist of one long steel plate, 20 metres long, 10 metres high.

"I want to cut through it with a laser, and place one part in Delhi and another in Islamabad, to show that one side has the soul, the other the body."

Of course, knowing Kerkar, it is entirely possible, the cutting might end up creating waves enough to be linked to his favourite motif "" the sea.