Casting cement: From walls to art galleries

The artist in me is always very enthused about the use of new materials as a medium of communication and creative impulse. For one it is so liberating to clamber out of the box and explore new things, though I dare say that one is blessed not to be in the box in the first place! But however few self-imposed boxes we put ourselves into, these are always on the radar to be abandoned at the first whiff of being boxed. An intrinsic part of being surely out of the box is choosing to be an artist and that too with the abstract genre as the idiom. This preamble is only to contextualise the subsequent thought process.

I have grown up in the era when cement as a material of house building and its aesthetic embellishment was de rigueur. I have a very vivid memory of the use of readymade cement jaalis to create lattice windows on our terrace and enjoying the peek-a-boo as it accorded an open-ended privacy of sorts and yet allowed a dialogue with the elements. During the same building exercise I distinctly recall my mother creating a cut out on a newspaper that the mason used to create a very basic central motif of a flower with diamond shaped petals on the red cement floor by juxtaposing grey and white cement to delineate the design.

I suspect that partly because of poor masonry neither the floor got its desired smooth and shiny red colour and texture nor much became of the diamond shaped flower. However what remained were these childhood memories where cement was the most important option as far as material goes and I did end up dabbling in it with varying degrees of success.

For many months artist Manisha Gawade and I toyed with the idea of cement on our canvas for the freedom that it can lend as a possible texture thanks to its fineness and ability to mould without cracking if used correctly. I have mixed small pebbles in it and added resin in it to create a large painting that harked to the Gangotri and the hurtling waters of the Ganga to immense effect.

So it was with great personal interest I went to see Craft Béton, a Dalmia Bharat collection of creations fashioned out of cement. Speaking on the occasion, Puneet Dalmia, managing director, Dalmia Bharat Group said, “It reflects a paradigm shift in the perception, use, and application of cement. By demonstrating the sheer versatility of this material, Craft Béton has demonstrated that cement can be very aesthetic, practical and even aspirational.” The organisation prides itself on having consistently and successfully calibrated cement in various ways, fine-tuning it for the end consumer across geographies and for different needs. The show is an expression of innovation which has actually created a new category for cement.

The show features tables, chairs, body moulding bean bag looking stools, a truly iconic bar stool, cheese and fruit platters, trays, bottle holders, ash trays, lampshades to other household knick knacks and even jewellery. Essentially a design initiative with three designers Alan Saga (Mexico), Iti Tyagi (India) and Somesh Singh (India), and an artist Miroslaw Baca (Poland) who made some very interesting forays into design and culminated as a showcase of how cement can replace other materials.

Over 50 high-end luxury products are featured in the show. The show could have made an even greater impact to highlight the beauty and aesthetic quotient of the pieces had it been displayed like sculpture, or curated as a body of work of each individual artist or designer like an art show. For me, a piece Metamorphosis was the real piece de resistance of the show — a steel bar stool with a cement seat in which steel cut outs of alphabets were embedded to amazing impact. A spice rack married to steel lids was another set that stood out by far for the simplicity and elegance of design. Some of the platters were sculpturesque in their impact as were some jewellery pieces.

Apart from moulding, one of the ways cement has been embellished has been by embedding steel, glass or stone, which is traditional as it is innovative. I recalled a cement rolling board or chakla that I had acquired in Allahabad years ago that I used as a table top. This chakla was a specialty of a nomadic tribe which would embellish it by embedding bits of coloured glass and mirrors to make it beautiful. It was rather like the Rabbadi tribes in the Rann of Kutch who decorate their homes with bits of glass embedded into mud walls. In this show the jewellery segment is perhaps the most exciting for it has endless possibilities like terracotta jewellery but in the case of cement, it needs to be truly contemporary lest it falls into the trap of purely traditional and remains at the level of craft and not catapulted to global connect.

While the show did highlight the versatility of the material using cement and alter its popular perception, there is a veritable plethora of possibilities to use this man-made material to even greater impact and touch the realms of art. For I firmly believe that while design can make life simpler and more elegant, it is art that truly elevates.

Dr Alka Raghuvanshi
is an art writer, curator and artist and can be contacted on
alkaraghuvanshi@yahoo.com