Ranjani Shettar: Dewdrops and Sunshine showcases the artist’s unique approach to sculpture including material experimentation, relationship to space, engagement with nature, exploration of tradition and resonance with modernism. Often transforming natural phenomena into magical forms, Shettar creates sculptures informed by a material openness that borrows from Indian craft traditions filtered through her own novel sensibility. But Shettar is not simple a formal purist. It is her ongoing quest to present a synthesis of form and narrative through a vocabulary uniquely her own that makes her practice singular within the terrain of contemporary sculpture and installation art, which is rife with, on the one hand, found object one-liners, and on the other, a dizzying array of outsourced fabrications
The works on display in this exhibition explore a wide spectrum of natural phenomena: the kinetic response of plants in the presence of sunlight and to sudden movement; the human sneeze as a reflex to bright light; the interaction of water and sunlight; and the fluorescence of fireflies. Dewdrops and Sunshine presents a sampling of Shettar’s sculptural approach; all of the selections on some way reflect upon formal ideas of volume, suspension/attachment, light and shadow, as well as materiality.
"Visitors will be amazed by the diversity of the materials used, the biological and cultural concepts Shettar explores and the spatial engagement one has with the works – truly a phenomenal experience.”
-Gerard Vaughan, Director NGV