Reflections on Loss and More: Hormazd Narielwalla at the Southbank Centre
A new series of work by emerging artist Hormazd Narielwalla is currently showing at the Southbank Centre's Member's Area.
Lost Gardens, a specially commissioned body of 12 artworks is installed on the upper level facing the iconic river front. Creating a contemplative promenade experience, the works are set to trigger reflections ranging from personal experiences of loss to the current political destruction of community and culture. The exhibition will be in situ until October.
Lost Gardens describes a visual journey that takes for its starting point the artist’s memories of the rose garden in his boyhood home in Pune India, an idyllic spot where he would visit with his mother to choose their own roses, and watch the gardener cut and trim them. The garden represented a place of solace, contemplation, and unity between humans and nature. It was then sold and the rose beds built over during the economic expansion. Taking cue from these personal observations, the artworks on show invite the spectator onto a journey into an intricate maze of layers of meaning. For each of the 12 works multiple readings become possible, depending on the visitor’s own experiences and personal history. In the artist’s collages, carefully crafted from tailoring patterns, geometrical shapes arise out of found historical material and create visual stories and socio-political commentary through subtle editing and arranging.
To the political eye, in Narielwalla’s work an emotion of loss meets the human longing for structure, but encounters instead the brutal mechanism of market guided gentrification and urban destruction. The garden becomes a metaphor for an endangered refuge, a cultural shelter created through careful communal cultivation and at constant risk to political recklessness. Putting a multicultural approach and historical roots side by side at the heart of his practice, Lost Gardens essentially becomes the artist’s reminder of the fragility of the precious garden of beauty that is human culture.
Hormazd Narielwalla (1979) is a London-based artist who works in collage. Narielwalla uses bespoke Savile Row tailoring patterns, and their antiquarian and contemporary trade counterparts, to create artworks exploring the body in abstract form. His practice began in the workrooms of the tailoring firm Dege & Skinner in London’s Savile Row, with an artist’s book, Dead Man’s Patterns(2008), which reflects on the bespoke suit patterns of deceased customers. Narielwalla has worked with patterns from many sources, including 1970s luxury lingerie (Lady Gardens), antique magazine inserts (Le Petit Echo de la Mode), uniforms from the British Raj (Love Gardens for COLLECT 13), and a 1920s tailoring manual (Hungarian Peacocks, 2013).
Since Narielwalla’s first Solo Show, Study on Anansi, was sponsored and exhibited by Sir Paul Smith in 2009, he has had critical and commercial success in the art world. In 2013 Saatchi Art online magazine announced Narielwalla as ‘One to Watch’ and in 2014 he won the Saatchi Art Showdown prize – The Body Electric. His work has been commissioned by Crafts Council for the national touring exhibit Block Party (2011) and Collect 13 at the Saatchi Gallery (2013). He exhibits regularly in London, and has shown work in Melbourne, Stockholm and Athens as well as at Scope Art Fair in New York (2010) and the India Art Fair, New Delhi (2014).
Other collaborations and associations include Centre of Possible Studies/Serpentine Gallery; Beams Tokyo; V&A Museum Shop; Artbelow; Jigsaw; Tiger of Sweden; Hyatt Regency London – The Churchill and CHART gallery. Narielwalla’s work is held in public and private collections worldwide, including the British Library; the National Art Library, INIVA; Fashion Institute of Technology, New York; and Parsons School of Art & Design, New York.
Narielwalla holds a PhD from University of Arts, London, and is the author of a biography of Master Tailor Michael Skinner, The Savile Row Cutter (Benefactum, 2011).
A limited edition book accompanies the Lost Gardens series
Visiting the exhibition
Twitter @Narielwalla
