Collection Chainsaw Bread
Take an artist’s love for trees, his recollections and reflections. Simran Lamba’s inner ruminations about the environment drives the creation of these sculptures that talk to us about what man has done to his own environment. In many ways this has a John Milton resonance –of Paradise Gained and Paradise Lost.
Simran takes us through his process as he shares his jottings. “The structure captures a torn out tree root whilst the process of foraging for wood takes place.”
He adds a convex mirror placed right in the center of the carved grotto sitting over a cast copper plate that represents the incision made on to the original wood in its intrinsic shape. The three inch convex mirror which is in the very center of the incision encased in fine copper and brass wire around it represents the natural age lines of a cut down tree stump. “I have created a sculpture in which I have structured huge protruding roots extolled with copper cast extensions ,” states Simran.
In many ways Simran is talking about the wealth of nature that lies before us and what we have taken away.
In Tree Series: 2 the sculpture captures the torso of the trunk with sawn off branches, the branches and the roots are made of wire mesh interspersed with copper and steel wire highlighting natural bark formations with the same. At the top of the wire mesh branches are convex mirrors also depicted through the use of the same brass and copper wire encased mirror within the wooden torso of the subject.
Copper recast in a mould becomes the surreal core of the Tree Series: 3. In this image the moulded clay part is replaced in cast copper with a reddish hue and has protruding wooden tree trunk remnants emerging seamlessly out of this copper extolled natural formation this particular structure.
“ The deliberately separated parts of these once cohesive tree trunks hold within them a copper and brass wire encased convex mirror,” explains Simran. “The sculpture also has fragile tiny branches and leaves reaching out towards light emerging out of the dead wooden remnants encapsulating my thoughts on the right to life and its re emergence from a state of macabre violence.” The sculpture resting on pools of cast aluminum and smaller convex mirrors is surrounded by black industrial chains.
The beauty of materials such as wood, copper, brass and convex mirrors adds to the esoteric nature of the works that at first seem hybrid and complex. It is only when you look closer that you see the interplay of materials and the multiple contexts of the past and present that come into play. Simran the writer, the thinker, the creator is one who wants to bring home the complexities of biological naturality lasting millions of years which man can destroy within fractions of a second. It is this love for the environment a Thoreau like loyalty and a visible sensitivity that makes these sculptures exemplifications of the power of life and botanical bravura.
