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Read interview with Ivan Smith

As a practicing artist of twenty years I have positioned myself on the periphery of the art market in the UK. This has developed for many reasons but primarily due in no part to the artist led initiatives during the early nineties in Birmingham with the visual arts group Fine Rats International. Managing our own opportunities and then inviting other prominent artists to engage in later projects, this along with the scale these opportunities offered my work placed me in a category of self-sufficiency that excluded any meaningful dialogue with London Galleries at that time.

After Fine Rats International disbanded in the late nineties I continued to work on an ambitious scale, concentrating on non-gallery venues around the UK thus extending my dislocation to a market value and process. My ambition to work abroad developed towards the end of the nineties when opportunities to exhibit through residencies in Marseille and Sydney launched my work on an international platform, which I am continuing to develop and nurture today.

 I was awarded the Henry Moore Fellowship in Sculpture in 2001 for two years, this opportunity opened up a diverse and expansive artist network globally, which is still continuously forming and reforming in a fluid and organic series of engagements.

An invitation in 2001 to participate in The Ninth International Art Camp organised by Túlsó P’art in Tihany on lake Balaton, Hungary introduced me to an artist responsible for organizing this and many other art camps and workshops in both Hungary and Romania, István Eröss. We have subsequently worked together on projects in both these countries and also Japan and Taiwan. Through this continuing dialogue of exchange István put forward my name for participation in a rural Workshop in February 2006 in Rajasthan, India called Sandarbh.

Here begins unsuspectingly the first tentative steps into the world of international contemporary art markets. Having little prior knowledge of this art camp or the artists responsible and which was only in its fourth year, I ventured into the wilderness and beauty of the Indian countryside alongside artists from England, Tanzania, Japan and notably Huseyin Alptekin from Turkey and five artists from all over India. What initially captured my imagination about this potential experience was its placement of the artists among the local population of this small town, who worked the land and traded in the local market every imaginable item. Work from previous workshops seemed ambitious in scale and imagination, which further fuelled my desire to engage.

This is when I meet Chintan Upadhyay artist and organiser of the Sandarbh art camp. Chintan also belonged to this invisible network of artists, which spanned the globe. Having participated in residencies in Australia, England and Romania he collected artists to join him in defying expectations and engaging with a new audience to contemporary artistic exchange. For a month we collectively and independently developed our work, within the local environment, which included small museums located in villages around the region. These museums, which displayed utensils and work objects donated by the villagers have been developed through a social awareness group based in the area that also provided health awareness and empowerment to local women of all casts through NGO groups.

The workshop culminated in an exhibition placed centrally in the town in an abandoned market, which was prepared especially for the purpose of the exhibition. I had made three artworks, which worked on different levels and engaged in different ways. ‘Lightweight’ was an installation using nine metal buckets bought from the local markets, in each bucket I cast concrete coloured by different pigment and a torch. The concrete was then taken out of the buckets and suspended within one of the local museums in a formal grid. The torches then could be used to shine onto the floor to mimic the shafts of light that penetrated the thatching of the roof. The second work called ‘Cycle’ was developed after realizing that the local tribes people of the area had in the past cut down a large metal ‘tap’ sculpture for its raw material value, this process fascinated me. The work consisted of ten large bowls bought again from the market which I welded together to form five pods, these pods had engravings in Hindi on then with welcoming, good health and happiness messages and a photograph of me handing a bowl in offering inside. The pods were then placed in the centre of the local lake so that they gently bobbed in the breeze. Within a week these pods had been stolen and the cycle completed back to a functional process of use but with scares of its previous existence. The third work was called ‘His & Hers’ and again its origins were sourced from the market. I became interested in a metal box sold on the market, which functioned as a dowry box for young women of the village when they left their house when marrying to start a new life at the homes of their new husbands family, the past encased neatly into a tiny shiny metal box. I made an identical wooden box which I covered every surface in long nails, I then drilled the metal box surfaces with holes and inserted a light into the box before sealing it. I raised the metal box onto feet so that it stood level with the wooden box; the two boxes were then exhibited in the market side by side both during the day and then transforming at night.

While back in Mumbai I visited the Ashish Balram Nagpal Gallery in Juhu where Chintan had just finished exhibiting his highly acclaimed ‘Clone Vitthala’ exhibition. During conversations with both the gallery owner Mr. Nagpal and the artists it was clear that at that time India was considered a closed market, with dealers and collectors buying predominantly India artists work with the main medium of currency being painting. A new confidence and energy was palpable within the art scene in Mumbai, I left India feeling I had accomplished a small body of work in a difficult environment but which exceeded my expectations, made good friends and had a clearer insight into a burgeoning art market dedicated to its artists.

To my great surprise several months later, I was contacted by Mr. Nagpal and Chintan inquiring into the possibility of me showing at the Ashish Balram Nagpal gallery sometime during early 2007. My preconceptions of the India scene shattered, I willing agreed to develop a solo show at the gallery. Over the course of the next six months through a constant dialogue it was agreed that I would develop three strands to the exhibition by placing work at three different venues, both of Mr. Nagpal’s Galleries and a suitable public environment for a new larger version of the Rajasthan artwork ‘His & Her’. ‘The Good, the Bad & the Ugly’ became the title for this three-pronged project. In one gallery I was to install my signature work ‘Breathing Space’ which was originally designed for a solo show in 1999 at Artspace, Sydney and then became my only work to be exhibited for a second time when it was in the exhibition ‘The World is a Safer Place’ at the Globe Gallery in Newcastle in 2005.

The second gallery was to play host to a new series of sculptures and installations designed specifically for this show centered on the use of the Action Man doll as a discarded obsolete child’s toy, but with a strong political undertone. I used reconstructions of the abuse on Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison by American soldiers amongst other provocative and sensitive issues made more sinister and macabre by the use of the dolls.

The third site, after a lot of negotiation and political manipulation became the fringes of a public space called Shivaji Park. Centered in a natural amphitheatre on the edge of the park and alongside a busy pedestrians path the work became an oversized version of the original in Rajasthan. The two boxes this time measuring 10′ x 5′ x 6′ has as its starting point a dowry box bought from the market and which addresses issues of gender. This sculpture speaks through time from day to night, the relationship changes, the struggle between the two continues.

The exhibition opened on Friday 16^th of March and ran until the 15^th of April to widespread media interest, Mr. Nagpal has stepped even closer to opening up the Indian art scene by having an international dialogue with artists by hosting this exhibition and inviting me to allow him to become a representative of my work in India and abroad, bucking the trend of Indian artists being exported on mass to an increasingly eager western audience and client base. Now India has the chance to open a discourse on a global scale with its centre firmly based within its borders in both Mumbai and Delhi.

I will concentrate on being part of this dialogue in the future with the support of my artist’s networks and my new found relationship within the art market. Is this a false dawn or can I really see the light at the end of the tunnel?