In a workshop in Jammu, a human figure is being finished by hand — one of about twenty-five that will eventually stand in an evolution park at the Army Public School here. Around it, in various stages of completion, are lions, monkeys, reptiles and butterflies.
The process is slower than the fibreglass finish suggests. "We first create the sculpture in clay," explains Rahul Sharma, who holds a BFA in sculpture from the University of Jammu. "After that, the moulding process is carried out, followed by the final fibreglass casting." Every figure passes through all three stages.
Sharma works with two others. Kunal Sadhotra is a professional sculptor from Reasi with roughly a decade in the trade. Sakshee holds a master's in Applied Arts and has spent around ten years in fine arts. Between them they have built a body of work around Jammu that most residents have walked past without knowing who made it.
For the Army's Northern Command, they cast three-foot memorial statues of Captain Devashish Sharma, Sepoy Deepak Kumar and Sepoy S Yousuf, installed at the Northern Command hospital. An earlier commission there was a Guru-Shishya installation — an eight-foot guru figure flanked by two five-foot disciples.
Elsewhere: roughly thirty fibreglass figures for a Science Park project, animal figures for Jammu Zoo, wall paintings, and work on Smart City projects. "We have worked on several Smart City projects and fibreglass animal figures for Jammu Zoo, besides wall paintings," says Sadhotra.
What makes this worth reading if you are studying fine arts in Jammu is not the commission list. It is that the list exists at all, and that one of the three people producing it came through the same BFA programme you might be sitting in.
Sadhotra is blunt about the constraint that has not gone away. "Many artists have experience and talent, but they do not have the right platform or opportunities to showcase their work," he says. The team's main base is Udaipur; the Jammu space is a temporary workshop set up around these projects. That, in one detail, is the shape of the problem — the skill is local, the work is here, and the studio address is not.
An evolution park at a school is a modest thing next to a gallery show. It is also twenty-five commissioned sculptures, cast in Jammu, by people trained in Jammu, which is more than most fine-arts graduates here are told is possible.
