Set in Stone

an excerpt from an archive: https://latikanehra.com/archive-collection/set-in-stone

When that experience comes to an end, I often find myself overcome with a sense of sadness, a melancholia. Writing serves as a remedy. It provides closure to that state of elevation, preserving a record of the experience, the method, and the practice, extending the pleasure just a little longer.

Berlin. November 2024

As I prepared for my trip to India, I tried to visualize the next few months. I thought it would do me some good to work in a lighter medium, perhaps paint again. In fact, I tried very hard to project this possibility, but subconsciously, I think my mind was set in stone.

For some years now, I had been seeing artists go to Italy for marble-sculpting courses. It seemed almost customary for a sculptor to attempt a version of their work in marble, and I can understand that appeal, because if you closed your eyes and had to imagine a sculpture, it would likely be one made of marble, if not another kind of stone. Marble certainly intrigued me, but not in Italy. 

My earliest memory of the material takes me back to the marble-laden roads of Kishangarh, a small town in Rajasthan, India, which I would pass for the next nine years to reach my boarding school in Ajmer. So, when I thought about working in stone, it almost felt fated to return to India.

I had all these questions amassing even before I had started. What would it feel like to create something with the least amount of materials: no paints, no brushes, no kilns, no screens, just a rock and the simplest of tools. What would I create given such circumstances? The thought alone felt very primal, like one of these early humans in the stone age. As many times before, it promised to be this starting point that I long to feel again and again in my work, and with every new medium, the challenge gets greater. Firstly, one needs to understand a material, its structural composition, that largely directs its use & application and then there are many ways to play with it, break that expectation while all the time asking yourself, why? 

With regards to motive I should also admit to a long-standing dream of creating a public art sculpture at some point in my life. Stone is the durable material of choice here and then there’s Modigliani, Moore, Noguchi, Shah, Radhakrishnan, and a few more sculptors whose work I see now more as an ‘artist-making’ than as a ‘viewer-watching’ and I want to experience that ‘creators-high’.

The whole story continues here