How a Delhi art show uses sculpture to reflect vanishing gardens

In a sculpture titled Can I Call You Rose? In the ongoing exhibition at Method Delhi, Gul, industrial scrap, discarded metal objects, old mirrors and discarded brass jewelery come together in a wooden frame. It takes the shape of Charbagh from the 18th century Kishangarh painting of Maharaj Sawant Singh’s poem. Poems by poet Mir Taqi Mir made of burnt copper wires surround the empty centre. It has disappeared in a sense or GulA reminder of what we have lost.

Eternal Garden Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Read between the lines, and you’ll find this emptiness hidden beneath the sculptural flowers in each of the pieces designed by Ritu and Surya Singh of Wolf Jaipur for their first exhibition in Delhi. “Gul means flower, specifically rose, but it also means disappearance,” explains Ritu, adding that it was Brigitte Singh, a pioneer in textile designing, who got the idea to re-imagine the charbagh – the traditional four-part garden – as both a place of refuge and an act of resistance. “Charbagh and the Mughal Gardens have been her inspiration for over 40 years, and we were influenced by that. Also, we live in Jaipur where there are many charbaghs. We have kept both the physical and symbolic aspects of it as a safe space for leisure, pleasure, poetry and politics. We maintained it because these safe spaces for freedom of expression are gradually eroding,” she adds.

The flower is also a reflection of heaven and a personal outpouring. “What do you do in situations where you have nothing else? You look for beauty and poetry, and you help yourself endure it. For us, the beauty was in the scraps and the discards,” she says. For this exhibition, he also adapted the words of 18th century Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir to find beauty and hope even amidst violence and destruction. “We also read that he was known as the Romancer of Delhi and that meant even more for our first show in the capital,” says Ritu.

Water hyacinth Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The garden of his Symbolism develops in four parts, in which the sculptural utopia is divided into the inner garden of the self, the physical garden of the world, the plural, the ideal of the human future, the utopian garden, and the garden of poetry. At Gul Baghi, a vault bursts with flowers in full bloom, an act of resistance that suggests love and beauty against plunder. A damaged Jamawar shawl becomes the canvas for Tears Fade, which features discarded jewellery, mirror fragments, ceramic eyes and metal joints that act as tears – tears that were shed for the lost gardens. In the Resting Place an abandoned lawn mower turns into a gun – a reminder that just as Babar’s homesickness gave rise to the charbagh, so too, the plowing of lawns through gardens and parterres served as a form of nostalgia for the British. “Lawns are sterile and seasonless. It’s a monoculture that doesn’t support anything. In a way, it’s beauty at gunpoint. The obsession with lawns continues and if you have a piece of land outside your house, you won’t think of planting trees or flowers, but you will think of a lawn. Flowers have disappeared,” she says.

The Eternal Garden, inspired by Humayun’s Tomb, is a multi-layered, multi-textured 33-piece complex similar in layout to the Delhi garden and a spectacular example of the early charbaghs of India. Between X-rays – as an analogy for looking deep within – Brigitte’s poppy prints, old shaving blades, discarded clock parts, iron rods and glass beads, the materials created a work that, according to the gallery’s note, “reflects continuity through rupture: the garden as a structure that absorbs violence. Rather than an idyllic space outside of history, the Eternal Garden is here understood as history itself – wounded, Changed yet continually productive.” “The fact that it is a 16th-century monument and the gardens are still enjoyed today proves the durability of the gardens and its ideologies,” says Ritu.

Flowerspeak | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Another main attraction are the four altars – word, breath, rhythm and song. Constructed from broken chairs as symbols of rising above inequality, they create space to reflect, breathe, declutter, and surrender. Perhaps the most introspective of all the pieces is Flowerspeak, which is created as a language of flowers where each flower represents a specific alphabet. Correlate the letters and flowers with Meir’s verses written on the walls, and you will be able to decode the script for a time when gardens and free speech find themselves at odds.

Gul will be at Method, Delhi till 30th November.