Cairns

This artwork featured in Synthetic Landscapes (2017). 

Jasleen Kaur is intrigued by the capacity of objects and materials to hold cultural and social meaning. Through usage and every day routines, objects and materials can reveal the nature of national customs and groups of people. This allows her as an artist to transform and invent new objects that hold new meanings and reflect contexts such as cultural intermixing. A Scottish Indian artist now based in London, Jasleen was brought up in a traditional Sikh household in Glasgow. She is interested in reflecting this dynamic cultural mix which is the reality of contemporary Britain.

Cairns is a series of sculptures influenced by the actions of her father, who, for 30 days, ritualistically prepared a joth (ghee candle) and placed it on a derelict plot of land by their house within a shelter of bricks and tiles. Her family was advised by a Sikh saint to light a joth at sundown for thirty days to ward of negative energies. Urban sprawls all too often don’t even register as landscapes and are blanked out by our collective gaze, so conditioned are we to seek out beauty.

This project is explicitly personal to Kaur, and explores the disparity between Indian and Western rationale through an object that expresses a confluence between two cultural ideas: values and aesthetics. In itself, the landscape is commonly regarded to be a synthesis of two similar ideas: spirituality and beauty.

Image: Jasleen Kaur, Cairns, installation view, Synthetic Landscapes, Weston Park and Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery, 2017. Image courtesy Meadow Arts. Photography by Stefan Handy. 

 

About the artist

Jasleen Kaur

Jasleen Kaur exhibited in Synthetic Landscapes, Weston Park: Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, 2017.

Image: Jasleen Kaur, Cairns. Image courtesy the artist.