Gotta have Faith

Faith is a strange thing. We inherit it, reshape it, sometimes damage it; and yet it persists, in stone, in mud, in the ringing of a distant bell. This series, GOTTA HAVE FAITH, grew out of an encounter with lingams, mukhalingam and yonis at my residency at the India Heritage Museum in Singapore. Something in those forms stayed with me, and I began making my own interpretations of them upon returning to my studio in Auroville.
Vimal Bhojraj filmed this tableau at Studio Mandala, on a full moon night, which documents an installation built around the imagery of the lingam; the thousands of stone forms that quietly inhabit our subcontinent, half-buried in riverbeds, worn smooth by water and time. The installation brings you into a dark space, lit only waist-down, the floor a landscape of cracked, drying mud scattered with ceramic lingams and mukhalingams, outlined by flickering oil lamps. Above are large ceramic bells, carved with Navagraha motifs, suspended on black cow-ropes. An ambient soundtrack, woven through with the sound of temple bells, holds the whole space together.
This body of work carries the weight of devotion and cosmology together, forms that speak to creation, fertility, and the planetary forces believed to govern our lives. It sits at the intersection of the sacred and the sculptural, asking the viewer to encounter these symbols not as artifacts but as living presences. I’ve always been uncomfortable with art that simply spews metaphors. And yet this work couldn’t entirely escape them; nor did I want it to. What I wanted instead was texture. The feeling of faith as something physical, something you move through rather than look at. One has gotta have faith, faith, faith!