Often disarmingly simple in appearance, Sheela Gowda’s works are endowed with great poignancy and subtlety. 

Sheela Gowda received her Bachelor of Arts from Bangalore University and later a Masters degree from the Royal College of Art, London, has had numerous solo exhibitions and has also participated in various group exhibitions. Her focus on process-based art is evident in her choice of humble materials, her elaborate installations and her manipu lation of found space.

Her art resides within a space in between the global and the local. Her work dwells upon the passage of time, the pain of grief, nuances of violence, concepts universally shared, understood.

Yet her usage of specific and indigenous media like tar drums or Kumkum (a red dye utilized for body adornment) reflect local concerns and lends primacy to the subaltern and a sensitive consideration of reality.

Trained as a painter, Sheela Gowda made a radical switch towards sculpting and installation in the 1990s. Such unconventional, often lowly materials have proved a means of subversion and a rather poignant expression of the melancholy and angst precipitated by local sociopolitical tensions.

The artist’s labor-intensive installations stand for her principle of ‘preserving the integrity of her selected materials even while dealing with the peculiar resistances of each of these materials. She looks for a kind of ‘specificity within abstraction’ for avoiding strident statements.

Instead she seeks to reveal meaning via subtle layers of suggestion. As she
herself reveals, “I think resistance is very important. It gives you the challenge, the convictions and the idea as well.”

One of her noteworthy installations, ‘Darkroom’ is a pseudo-house crafted out of both unaltered and flattened tar drums which simultaneously conveys the grandeur of Greco-Roman colonnades and the barren simplicity of road workers’ temporary shelters. Upon crawling into the structure and standing, one finds an interior of stillness and darkness lit gently by a punctured ceiling evoking the night sky.

Her use of humble materials specific to local cottage industries and infrastructure reflect her urgent desire “to address the political debates and the angst” felt by herself and many others given current socio-political tensions in India. Yet the artist shies clear of fundamentalism and sentimentality, stating, “I do not like to use my work as a vehicle for making strident statements and need subtler means.”

She also had used cow dung as a painting medium, as a specific reference to the importance of this holy animal in India. Making use of the cow dung, the artist worked on a project of drawings. Her sculptural installations are also often comprised of cow dung and ash. Each of her creations is monumental in its scale and content, which remains the hallmark of her oeuvre.