Deities and Idols: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran at Tramway
We travel to Glasgow's cultural venue for a celebration of global ceramics...
February 6, 2024
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The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
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Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
-min.jpg)
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
The lurid Queen (2023) is a good few feet shorter than the towering Cob God of Tramway’s new exhibition, Idols of Mud and Water. But for its creator, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, it is the most important sculpture in the show. ‘He doesn’t say why,’ says Alexander Storey Gordon, Assistant Curator at Glasgow’s cultural centre, but walking through the vast warehouse of works, clues quickly reveal themselves.
Ramesh’s family migrated from Colombo, Sri Lanka, to Australia as refugees of the civil war in his infancy in the late 1980s. His colourful, human-animal hybrid sculptures embody the many co-existent belief systems of his ancestry; myths, media, and icons common across Southeast Asia are baked into his ceramic forms.
His ancient deities and totemic idols also serve to protect; as figures that mark entrances and exits, they reflect his own movements in space and time. A great stack of rams, signed by the artist’s hand, is an ‘avatar’ of different modes of self-representation and portraiture encountered in his research, particularly in early Gandharan Buddhism and Hinduism.
Ramesh’s practice draws from histories of figurative representation, especially in wood carving, as much as Western European art traditions and contemporary movements like abstract expressionism. He describes it as a kind of ‘sampling’, a simultaneous existence in past, present, and future, which challenges dominant narratives and exposes continuities. Nor does he prescribe to any simplistic binaries, be they East/West, or rational/emotional; while cognisant of how expressive art was historically subjugated as ‘uncivilised’, of more interest is how visual cultures have merged through shared histories of empire and exchange. His King (2023), for example, comes clad in an ambiguous textile, which could be a contemporary sari, a classical Greek toga, or some combination of the two.
As an artist, Ramesh both inherits and creates cultures. When working with ceramics, Diana Campbell Betancourt argues that he defies Western domination of the creation myth. The tradition of breathing life into clay can be found across many different cultures: In Christianity, Adam is made from clay, and Eve is then constructed from his rib. But in Hindu mythology, the gender hierarchy is reversed; it is Parvati, the mother of Ganesha, who creates her son from clay and turns him into flesh and blood.
Ramesh’s ‘polymorphous figures’ are not simply physiologically or gender-fluid, but species-fluid. With their saturated green skin, the alien-like Queen (2023) glares directly into the future, whilst simultaneously referencing the cross-cultural icon of the Mother and Child. Its head, like so many of Ramesh’s sculptures, looks in many directions. The Seated Bronze Figure with Masks (2023) which opens Icons - an ‘exquisite corpse’ of a character - has been carefully welded together from various pieces over the last six years, a detailed amalgam of bodies old and new.
This vast space allows for interesting conversations between Ramesh’s sculptures, large and small. Contrasts co-exist within the same sculpture too; alongside historic and contemporary motifs, he often includes ceramic surfaces both smooth and unglazed. Some look like they’ve been doodled on, including with the artist’s own signature, and most are adorned with glitter, tassels, beads, and emojis. (He considers the latter a universal language - accepting the problematic of calling anything universal - because of the primacy of the face across visual cultures).
We need no points of reference, nor prior knowledge, to enjoy and access Ramesh’s work. At times, he takes on the role of the joker, his child-like playfulness coupled with a great body of contextual knowledge. He exaggerates the lengths of tongues and penises not as cheap thrills, but as accurate depictions of visual cultural traditions. Clear on the distinction between queer and gay art, he sometimes leans into the suggestive, homoerotic tendencies of sculpture, the three legs of his other figures serving both a practical purpose for architectural stability and a sexually allusive one too.
The figures in Idols all gather around a central deity, a scaled-up totem of mud and straw (cob) whose head almost scratches the ceiling. Despite its theatrical flamboyance and electric and neon components, it is natural and elemental as a whole. What looks like more glitter on the bags around the fountain in which it stands is simply the glimmering of the sand inside. It filters water through itself, like any human being, whilst still evoking the gods and monsters which so inspire the artist. Its spurting hands recall Spider-man, and the roaring aspect Godzilla and King Kong, more pop culture characters with connections to nuclear war. As such, they are beings of both apocalypse and rebirth, of reformation - not a return or progression, but a change in course.
For an artist who rejects a linear approach to time - viewing it as a Western/European construct, which props up capitalist aims of constant production and creative output - Ramesh is remarkably prolific. At the corner of Tramway, we find a temple-like structure, staffed with almost one hundred terracotta sculptures, an Army led by a General who sits atop them all. A ninety-ninth figure is hidden up high, on a strut on one of the back of the structure, reinforces the artist’s interest in play, and the gamification of the art market more widely.
The spontaneous, collage-like form of these figures might suggest a fast artistic process, but this is far from the case. Slab built by hand in his studio, Ramesh’s ceramics are quickly built, but often undergo several firings before they are ever displayed. His practice is pragmatic and sustainable; rather than discarding, he tends to repair, fix, and glue together ‘shitty’ works to create something new.
Deciding what exactly constitutes a good or bad work is a wholly intuitive decision, the product of his ‘romantic relationship’ and confidence in his practice. Whilst intellectually engaged, he never over-rationalises his practice, and admits his vision doesn’t always line up with others’ perceptions. ‘I call it the Ramesh Bargain Bin,’ he says, refering to the box that sits at the bottom of his studio stairs, which has gifted both freebies for friends, and objects highly prized by collectors.
His practice challenges the marginalisation of ceramics as a small, intimate craft, rarely seen as a medium for monumental sculpture. The pluralistic Icons also marks a kind of reclamation, by their use to articulate or reflect anthropological ideas about the order and structure of society. ‘The history of ceramics is the history of society,’ he believes, but it’s a story that’s often told through limited, white canons.
Whilst often sexualised, or read exclusively in the context of queer politics, his sculptures rather expose wider societal norms. Ramesh is particularly fascinated by figurative sculpture in public spaces, perceiving the British colonial monuments (and fountains) found across Australia since the 18th century as more camp, obscene, and ‘perverse’ than any of his works. Often erected at the entrance of the country’s cultural spaces, his characters are welcoming and accessible, suggesting diversity of individual and collective being more widely.
Though working at a great scale, Ramesh is clearly not ‘another male artist, swinging his dick around’. Where other sculptures are designed to dominate or look over, Ramesh hopes his totems engage in a conversation with their viewers. ‘I want people to think someone with massive hands started making them,’ he says, but they must not necessarily be his.
At just 27 years old, Ramesh enjoyed his first solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia; he modestly suggests his works simply ‘outgrew’ the foyer. Despite practising for less than ten years, he already has an institutional archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At times, he seems almost surprised by his successes, including a recent monograph, a solo exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai (his first in South Asia), and a residency in Korea. Interestingly, his ceramics have been more readily appreciated in Asia, in spite - or because of - a great reverence for the tradition. Ramesh is, understandably, critical of the fetishisation of the media in Western Europe (and Australia, another enduring legacy of colonisation).
A mainstay of Australia’s art scene, Ramesh works with the Sydney-based Sullivan+Strumpf, who also represents artist Angela Tiatia, on show at the National Museum of Scotland, and recently at Frieze London, in Story, Place. He’s aware of contemporary art markets, institutions, and infrastructures - reading the critical discourse, and counting days spent in grant, prize, and residency applications as ‘studio days’ of work - perhaps in order to keep a comfortable, critical distance.
Known as the ‘Industrial Cathedral’, Tramway is a fitting home for Ramesh’s family of deities, and his first solo exhibition in the UK and Europe. The cultural centre opts for fewer, longer exhibitions, allowing for more ambitious projects with limited resources. ‘We’re Turbine Hall-scale without a Turbine Hall budget,’ says Storey Gordon, in a nod to the monumental venue at Tate Modern in London. As with his post-COVID show in Mumbai, Ramesh installed Idols almost entirely remotely by computer-generated model. He arrived from Australia just two weeks before the opening and, even during the long public programme, is unlikely to be able to return before it closes.
Tramway is one of the largest galleries in Europe, whose doors are open to a wide range of viewers; with these uncaptioned shows, visitors are encouraged to participate, co-create, and return over time. Many still reference the recent exhibitions of Pollokshields-based artist Jasleen Kaur, Jonathan Baldock, and Nick Cave; his great posters and patterns, and vision for Tramway as ‘an alternative town hall’, persist today.
Ramesh’s work has often been represented as an ‘alternative’ to Western/European art movements, but Idols reflects how such traditions have long been traded, transformed, and morphed. His dream world is thus a plural one, where these influences and practices can be accepted in parallel, rather than in competition. One where contemporary ceramics aren’t othered or trending, but embraced.
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: Idols of Mud and Water is showing at Tramway in Glasgow until 21st April 2024.
