Clay Platters

The artist began his working life as an architect and now works with clay.
These are his words on ethnography and on calligraphy in clay:
My platters speak of extinction …extinction of several vernaculars, which, in most cases, are the key to literacy. In a country as culturally rich as ours, we take it as axiomatic that every child of school age should attend school, and that every nonliterate should be made literate. We should also take it as axiomatic that the best medium of teaching is the mother tongue of the pupil. And though a second language, a “foreign” language, is necessary to connect to the outside world, the people of a country must always be in a position to express their free choice in the matter of language in which their children are to be educated.
Just as our biosphere is being eroded by modernization and globalization, so too is our "ethnosphere" - our cultural web of life. According to UNESCO estimates more than 6000 currently spoken languages will be lost in the next 200 years. The many and unique cultures of the world reflect different ways of being, thinking, and knowing… however, with the 300 years of British Raj in India, we sometimes accept the concept of European knowledge as truth, and the rendering of other forms as less valid or false: mere superstition, folklore, or mythology. In the case of language extinction, those "voices" which are deemed to be inferior or secondary by colonizing, globalizing, or developing forces are literally silenced.
Genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people’s way of life, culture and vernacular is not only not condemned, it's universally - in many quarters - celebrated as part of a development strategy.
In a small way, I hope my platters are statements against this, against the extinction of a species, the extinction of a language, the extinction of heritage. The Tamil texts proclaim yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the end of this. It is clay making a statement.
All works are handmade by me with locally prepared clay, and are wood-fired to 1300 degrees centigrade at Mandala Pottery in the international experimental community of Auroville, in the forests of south India.