"It is a reminder of the link man has with earth," points the artist, Valsan Koorma Kolleri, who hails from Pattayam in Thalassery in the northern Kannur District.
By the time Kolleri reached this city to participate in the biennale, fellow artists at the festival had acquired what he thought were the best spaces to put up the exhibits. But that did not dishearten the sculptor from North Malabar.
In any case, Kolleri has a penchant for working on discarded stuff. So, in a small concrete room that he was eventually allotted, the 59-year-old ended up installing an enchanting piece of art using scrap.
Thus, at the Biennale, Kolleri has displayed a site-specific work that lines up in various decks articles that are generally dubbed as useless.
The artist cites an example from the ubiquitous tree in his southern state.
"Take the case of coconut palm. We tend to restrict its concept to a tree that gives us just coconuts. This, when all its parts are useful", he says.
"We are too keen to discard materials after use. We never think of ways to reuse them. My work is an anti-thesis to that kind of a mindset," notes Kolleri, whose work is drawing crowds at the Aspinwall House, the main venue of the three-month long pioneering extravaganza that began on Dec 12.
Kolleri, who specialised in sculpting at MS University in Baroda, currently heads a sculpting school "Kalapatyam" in his native after having done higher studies in Superior National School of Advanced Techniques at Palaiseau in France with a French Government scholarship.
He has done some permanent installations in Kerala. They include the works at the Durbar Hall Ground in Ernakulam and State Nirmithi Kendra in Thiruvananthapuram, besides a Butterfly Park at Sakthan Thampuran Museum in Thrissur.
At biennale, Kolleri has also done an installation made of copper wires. The three-dimensional work titled: "I wish I can Cry".
