A Trail Of Thorns - SANDILYA THEUERKAUF

The Works Of
SANDY THEUERKAUF
A Short Film By Manush John

Publisher: Lorem Ipsum
Catalogue Design: Manush John
Photography: Manush John
© Sandy Theuerkauf / MANUSHJOHN.COM / Courtesy KYNKYNY.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without
prior permission of the artist and photographer.

The Works Of
SANDY THEUERKAUF

Introduction
by Michael Little
Sandy Theuerkauf is staging a thicket
opera in many parts.
Theuerkauf rambles through the
undulating dryscape of outer
Bangalore. An overland trek, a pause,
and then into a thicket he wedges
himself. He is surrounded by nature’s
armory, risking all manner of scrapes
and skin punctures he begins to
collect thorns.

These thorns are the backbone of
so much of the Deccan rocky scrub
forests. The armed plant is, in a way,
a signature of this harsh beautiful
landscape. The thorny ones heed
from groves and thickets among giant
boulder strewn ravines, ridges, shrines
and farmland verges. Thorns can be
the body parts of great or small trees,
zealous climbers, wily stragglers,
shrubs...
Hundreds of plants are armed here in
a desperate yet commanding attempt
to ward off browsers. The thorn
claims a sanctity for the plant. With
sharpness alone, they create a space,
or a multitude of spaces of protection.

These piercing defenders and
protectors of the plant world are
carefully cut, collected, categorised
and graded into shapes and sizes.
Theuerkauf keeps them sorted in
boxes with intimations of where
these found objects may land. A
fantastic variety of shapes - bulbous,
fiercely hooked, stoutly branched,
long spined. Here the intriguing form
always following function. These are
the players for the drama to be.

In nature these thorns are all but
concealed in the thicket of branches.
From a distance we see only leaves and
twigs, most thorns being obscured.
Some thorns in fact are disguised
as leaves and twigs. But Theuerkauf
envisions these hitherto invisibles as
splendidly visible. He choreographs
charged, dramatic, almost operatic
gatherings. The tightly packed thorns
are players. Each player outstretched
and joined in a chorus, wrapped in the
primal forms.
In a deft subversion, Theuerkauf
invites all of us into the thicket. A
sanctuary reversed and exploded in
an outward projection.

The artworks exhibit a
singularity. Their minimalist
assemblages assert something
beyond the everyday
experience. While the spiny
reliefs are certainly striking
with their restrained beauty,
there is something further in
the work that poses wider
questions.

Meanwhile Theuerkauf goes hunting
through the dusty local sawmills for a
variety of thick planks full of growth lines,
knots, cracks. Native softwoods - Ficus
religiosa and Ficus bengalensis - are
pale-plained or wear an antique auburn
or blackened patina. Always substantial
and ever imbued with the warm quality
of wood. Theuerkauf is ready to drill, glue,
assemble and transform.

Are these a gesture of a tribal imprint?
Is this an echoing of nature’s vast
replicative process? Ten thousand
similar leaves on every tree makes
for nature’s great serialisation. Here
hundreds of thorns are kept to a
reductive purpose. Textured gestures
suggestive of stillness and waves. The
thorns are not in the least bit tamed by
the mass assemblages. Sharpness and
beauty are concentrated, voiced and
released.
- Michael Little

A Trail Of Thorns
A Short Film By Manush John
.
.
.
manushjohn.com/atrailofthorns

Notes on the film
by Manush John
On the morning of the 14th of October
2016 I captured my first clip of Sandy
returning to a barbed wire fence that
delineated one piece of farm property
from another. This fencing was cladded
with lantana and other vicious looking
thorns that even I who had spent my
entire childhood running around this
landscape couldn’t recognise.
The thorns that once enmeshed and
protected a tree now lay purposefully
on the ground protecting a farmers
property from grazers and other curious
wanderers. On that cold morning I
watched through the lens of my camera
as Sandy carefully undid the dried prickly
bush, discriminately picking from it the
material that he needed to complete the
work that he had started back home.
When he was done taking what he
needed, he carefully put the shrub back
where he found it, so it could go back to
serving its purpose.

This was the first work he
showed me, and it quickly
pulled me into a world of its
own, of symmetry and chaos -
all of a sudden I was transfixed.

There is a deceptive simplicity to his work and
therein lies the intrigue for me. Beyond the
familiar geometric patterns made of piercing
wood, and beyond the blood spilled to weave
these thorns into their inevitable compositions
lies an inquiry that continues to engage me. With
time and repeated sittings, new worlds begin to
manifest on these wooden backings.

I see his work as a kind of negotiation between the designs
he experiences in nature and the implementation of his own
aesthetic explorations. It is unburdened by the aesthetics
and preoccupation of the time.
What he is dealing with is direct first-hand experience, and
as Antony Gormley puts it, you can simply sit and attend to
the fact of being and discover a philosophical truth. I feel
the work that he does is an acknowledgement of what is
around him, and the work becomes an experiment in being
faithful to what he sees. When it does come together,
it becomes an invitation and a portal into a world of
tenderness where these thorns speak a language of time,
of struggle and purpose.
- Manush John

Sandilya Theuerkauf was brought
up in rural Kerala, in the presence
of a hilly rainforest, its streams, and
its wildlife. His biggest impressions
in life are drawn from that world. He
now lives and works on the outskirts
of Bangalore, in a dry scrubland in
southern India.
Sandilya Theuerkauf: I have made what I think is art since I was a
child. There has always been an inner compulsion to create in keeping
with the life that flourishes around me - creating with mud and sticks,
water and stones, feathers and flowers. The process is very physical
and my work calls upon my whole body to engage with the land
I inhabit. This engagement has been through climbing, walking,
swimming, listening, observing and creating using my hands. These,
and many others, have been my ways of knowing. This kind of relating
to my surroundings is what stays with me, creating memories that
hold my body to the places I inhabit.
It was an observation of the shape and form of one particular thorn
that sparked the process of creating these pieces. I was drawn to the
thorn’s claw-like shape and character, and slowly I started to notice
both more thorns as well as the plants they protected. I wondered
then whether I could make something with these thorns but it took
several months for the idea to brew and to become something I could
give my time and attention to. The image of many of these thorns
together and the texture they would create excited me. I did not
imagine at the time that this idea would last beyond a single piece. But
observation has its own momentum; an initial looking leads to closer
attention which leads you on and on. I began to notice other thorns
on trees, climbers and shrubs. This arid landscape I have walked for
years suddenly opened up to me, and its stories were abundant.

The actual work of assembling the pieces is
an important part of the process, and a test of
my patience. Thorns are mounted densely on
wooden planks, making it challenging to create
the particular patterns I have in mind. The
sharpness of the thorns make the consequence
of inattention particularly immediate and clear
and I value the meditative quality that comes
with the concentration required to weave and
interlock them together.
This is the context from which my work has
sprung, taking place outside the contemporary
art scene, witness to nobody else but the
materials themselves. This process has been my
way of building a language with the earth and its
creations. However, today I have an urge to share
what I have been creating in my corner of the
world with other people, so maybe they too can
enter in their own way into this world of thorns I
have plunged myself into.
These days I feel deeply saddened and helpless
by the relentless destruction of our natural
habitats - at every level. The destruction
is cascading into something or someplace
dangerous because of our growing alienation to
our natural world. Life is sacred, and I feel it has
become too easy today to forget that we are not
the only ones here. I find our minds are filled
with conceptual, abstract ideas about ourselves
and others, of what is relevant and what isn’t and
those abstractions seep into our treatment of all
the other life around us.

I share this body of work not because I am above
it all, but because this kind of work is how I begin
that journey of connecting with the natural
world. When you are amidst all that life, you
will invariably succumb to it, because it is truly
beautiful. And you, like me, will start seeing our
earth as sacred grounds, to be celebrated and
protected. These works I share now are merely
a glimpse of what’s out there, and I’d like to now
think of these works as my grand invitation into
the thicket, into a world outside the white cube.
I want to honor the places I inhabit as they are,
to accept and relate to everything there without
my abstractions and narratives coming in the
way. There is a wonder of presence in nature.
On this journey of trying to make sense of
my relationship with the land, I realise that this
process involves more than just knowledge and
acquired skill. This body of work is an expression
of that feeling, a way of being, of relating with
the world.
- Sandilya Theuerkauf

Special thanks
Michael Little
Pankaj Singh
Manjari Chandrashekar
Reuben Samson
Natasha Sharma
Sruti Yusufi
Sarayu Sandilya
Mark Mc Coin
Chaiti Seth
Alok Utsav
Abhishek Jain
Meghna Saha
C. F. John
Reena Kappen
Namrata Kini
Vivek Radhakrishnan
And
Centre For Learning