Artist Jyotsna Bhatt is deeply devoted to the art of ceramics, says Uma Nair
Imagine a ceramic artist who began sculpting in the 1960s in Baroda. A high priestess of the world of minerals and fire and clay, who had to create her own alchemy of contours and colours, she looked around her garden at Baroda for her stimulus and inspiration.
Meet Jyotsna Bhatt, whose solo show in Kolkata after many years, defines her brilliance and her devotion to the art of ceramics in a country where a lot of potters have lost originality. What sets her apart from the deep, emotional investment in crafts in the state of Gujarat is her sensitivity and her distinct sensibility.
We can inherently sense a feeling of a completely different sensibility from that of ruralist craftsmen. We can see the genesis of a silent yet robust urban potter, who is at home in a contemporary world and comfortable in her own skin considering the fact that she has been firing pots since 1960's.
Deluge of creativity
Art lovers can behold a deluge of delightful creations, each one unique in its sustaining power of knowing the difference between what can be produced mindlessly and what can be created with passion, power and penetration of insight and aesthetics.
It is uncanny how in her agile hands, inert matter like stoneware, signature matte glazes and minerals seem to awaken, smoke, stretch and settle into a position of poise and reflective reverie. Jyotsna makes platters, cats, vases, bulbs and small artefacts that are not just utterly unique but are the embodiment of 21st-century Indianesque modernism. Yet rather than consciously follow the dictates or philosophies of an aesthetic school, she draws inspiration from what she sees in the garden around her: the quirky expression of a cat in sleep,the beauty of an opening bud, little vignettes from nature, all with a hint of antiquated murmurs.
Burnt browns and blue teal
These 50 odd stoneware creations, are interestingly made with an extremely limited palette of colours: burnt terracotta brown, teal and ash grey on a few variants of bulbs or platters or cats or quasi vases. It is possible to read them as parallel to a syntactical device, a way of allowing disparate elements to sit alongside each other. It allows Jyotsna to make coherent groups of work in a way that the connotations of nature’s effusions can speak in an age when ceramic art is fashionable but produced more out of the dictates of superficial whimsy rather than enigmatic or studied intimations.
This sense of objects being part of a much larger world is what makes Jyotsna stand out as an urban studio potter who teaches techniques and shares recipes of glazes with her students over years of workshops and travel. These 50 works, created over 2016-2017, echo their own accommodation with modernity. She uses the matte glaze and creates works in terracotta tones of burnt browns and also uses ash and blue teal.
When asked about her process and her preferences for firing she says: “The firing and temperature range I used for this show are both oxidation and reduction atmospheres. I used wood and gas firing, ranging from 1260 C to 1280C. I have always had a preference matte and satin matte glazes with mottled color tones. Colours for me had always been a softer natural tone variety. I reduce my firing using copper oxides and their carbonates, tin oxide and titanium di oxide. As for oxidation firing or what I call normal firing, I like the play of ash and flames on the works, which enhance the forms, so accordingly let them be open body.(without any glaze or glossy surface).”
(Uma Nair is an art critic and curator)