Brick Landscape and Tar Studies

Bijoy Jain is an architect internationally known for buildings that seamlessly inhabit their natural surroundings. After practicing for several years in Los Angeles and London, Jain returned to India in 1995 to found Studio Mumbai Architects, an architectural firm that works directly with a team of artisans, technicians and draftsmen to create and execute designs that draw from traditional and locally available materials and skills.

Brick Landscape (2014) is a series of meditations on the history and materiality of brick– an architectural medium which has been in continuous use since antiquity. To Jain, bricks are manifestations of a direct, almost corporeal link between man and the Earth. A versatile material equally suited to the humblest of structures and the greatest of architectural monuments, bricks represent a material transition of civilisational dimensions–that of raw earth into a form we understand as architecture. The landscapes that Jain has created out of miniature bricks resemble archeological ruins–from excavated subterranean cities to edifices that still stand. They simultaneously evoke constructions taking shape, and demolitions going on all around us. The installation unfolds like a journey in time, tracing the evolution of the built world through the history of one of its fundamental units.

Another work on display, Tar Studies (2014) is composed of a number of ambiguous forms encased in tar. The outlines that are visible through tar only hint at what is inside–seemingly the remnants of a settlement entombed in lava. The tar that covers the objects renders them simultaneously still and dynamic, engaging the viewer in a myriad of ways– from precise material study to metaphysical contemplation.