Nataraj Sharma's giant rusty installation of a half-completed building, Work in Progress, was installed at BodhiSpace, Mumbai, from the 14th to the 30th of November, 2008, making the gallery look like a dusty construction site. Sandhya Bordewekar speaks to Sharma about Work.

SANDHYA BORDEWEKAR: WHEN I SAW WORK IN PROGRESS BEING fabricated in your workshop in Baroda, it immediately reminded me of your show Recent Works (1994-96), held at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University. They seemed to anticipate this sculpture...

Nataraj Sharma: An aspect of art-making that continuously amazes me is its prophetic nature - how it anticipates its own future. An artist works on just a few big ideas throughout his/her life. The movement is cyclical despite its illusion of linearity.

Nataraj Sharma. Work in Progress. Installation. 2008.

I came to Baroda to teach in 1994 and rented a house on the outskirts of the city. Baroda was expanding rapidly, and living on the periphery, I was able to witness this upheaval and transformation. In the tools that were used for this transformation, in the labour of humans and machines, in the sensual assault that this process generated, I could feel a tremendous energy that challenged nature itself and that was what I tried to express. The paintings I did then showed denuded fields and garbage, fences and walls that marked open land as property, the scarring and gouging of the earth, the presence of structures, buildings, scaffolding, grids and geometric growth sprouting everywhere in a rain of cement and steel. I came to recognize the eloquence and fidelity of objects. I saw that objects have a still life, a permanence and a consistency that stand in contrast to the fickleness and constant negotiations of human exchanges. I looked at objects and they looked back at me. They said: "Reveal us and we will reveal you."

In the paintings that dealt with objects and landscapes, I often included small detailed drawings of ordinary buildings. From being just one of the many elements within a landscape, over time these buildings became isolated. They moved from drawing to painting to photography to etching, and finally acquired a three-dimensional form.

S. B.: STRETCH, the series of etchings you made at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute residency in 2006, also seemed to 'anticipate' Work in Progress.

Nataraj Sharma. Work in Progress. Installation. 2008.
Note: The artist has requested that no image of
himself be used with the interview.

N. S.: At the residency I worked on large etchings. As I prepared these etchings, my thoughts travelled to Gurgaon, a place I have been visiting for the last 20 years. I witnessed its extraordinary transformation into a geometric jungle of vertical growth. It is there that I began drawing and photographing large building projects, skeletal and exposed. I could see the strong grid within the structure of these buildings, the logic of their construction - how a unit was repeated vertically (almost endlessly). I also recognized that the grid has multiple meanings. The purity of a grid-ed line, like the light of a laser, carries an emotive load. It's a tool for planning, structuring and defining volume; it works as a skin on the surface of an object. The grid, by its nature, is perfect and precise. It can also imprison.

S. B.: In the semi darkness of BodhiSpace, Work in Progress looked like an abandoned giant, with no signs of life around or within it.

N. S.: I find a particular poignancy in half-built buildings. I see them as works in progress - frozen in time. Great towers thrusting upwards, bridges between our shuffling and the heavens, geometric mountains catching the sunlight. Measuring the earth and the sky, grids and plans drawn in careful preparations. Cities of constant churning and expansion become in time Machu Picchu, Fatehpur Sikri, Angkor Wat. Consumed by time, by forests. Huge vanities that lie stalled in ruins. System errors, fatal miscalculations, empty of labour and empty of life. Totemic buildings as heroic challenges to the sky, rooted in the idea of the builder as heroic.