Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: In the Beginning

Untitled Figure 11 (detail) 2016 earthenware, polystyrene, glaze, Indian human hair, porcelain, enamel, shells, wooden beads, false teeth

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Foreword

The Ian Potter Museum of Art is pleased to present In the Beginning, which premieres the work of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran for Melbourne audiences. This prolific young artist has gone from strength to strength since winning the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship in 2014, not long after his graduation from UNSW Art & Design in Sydney. In the following year he was awarded the lucrative Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Art Award at Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria and in 2016 alone he has presented new bodies of work in Magic Object, the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art; at the Kuandu Bienniale in Taipei, Taiwan and a solo exhibition, Mud Men, at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Each exhibition has expanded the language of Nithiyendran’s formally inventive sculptural practice. In the Beginning represents an exciting development for the artist. Across an entire floor of the Museum, vibrant colour and wall drawings contribute to an ebullient environment populated

by Nithiyendran’s ceramic figures and a major new bronze sculpture, the artist’s first foray into this medium. Objects from the Cultural Collections of the University of Melbourne provide counterpoints to Nithiyendran’s sculptures, and underline his many references to the history of art and religious iconography.

We are very grateful to the generous lenders to this exhibition: Shepparton Art Museum and Dr Terry Wu, for allowing us to augment the many new ceramic and wall-based works within the exhibition with a few key earlier pieces. We would

< Untitled Figure 12 (detail) 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, resin, shells, wooden beads

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also like to thank our colleagues at the University of Melbourne, Dr David Young and Rohan Long, who enabled the inclusion of several items from the wonderful collection of the Tiegs Zoology Museum. Our thanks also go to the team at Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney, for their support, particularly Ursula Sullivan and Nicholas Shoebridge.

Congratulations and thanks are due to Jacqueline Doughty, the Potter’s Curatorial Manager, for her work on the exhibition and this handsome publication, and to all of the Potter staff for their role in helping to ensure its success. Our most effusive thanks however, are reserved for the artist, for embracing this opportunity to expand his work into the realm of immersive installation, an appropriate format for an exhibition that explores the notion of creation myths and the making of new artistic languages and worlds.

It is safe to say that the galleries at the Potter have never looked so vibrant.

At the Ian Potter Museum of Art we strive to present the best of Australian contemporary art practice within the context of a rich and diverse historical collection. We hope that our audiences enjoy Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s innovative and mischievous contributions to a long lineage of human representation in art and visual culture.

Kelly Gellatly Director

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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: In the Beginning Jacqueline Doughty

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Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naivete and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality.1

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran plays upon the symbolic and transformative qualities of clay to create iconoclastic sculptures that push the boundaries of figurative sculpture and the ceramic medium.

Combining Hindu and Christian symbolism with the subversive imagery of internet memes, his wildly mishapen characters act as avatars through which to explore gender and eroticism, religion and popular culture, exoticism and outsider aesthetics.

For the exhibition In the Beginning, Nithiyendran has created an environment populated by his distinctive clay sculptures, alongside objects selected from the Cultural Collections of the University of Melbourne: ancient Greek vases, a nineteenth century floral still life painting, a cement sculpture of a Hindu god, Indian folk paintings and taxidermied animals from the Tiegs Zoology Museum. Set amidst hot pink and bright yellow walls that have been further embellished with chalk drawings and spray painted graffiti, this exuberant exhibition immerses the viewer in a tumult of colour and fantastical form.

The exhibition’s title refers to creation myths. To the artist, these narratives about the origins of the world suggest analogies to the creative process and to the generative potential of his preferred medium. The malleability of clay provides the artist with a metaphor for the boundless potential in the moment of creation, when formlessness gives rise to an artistic freedom in which anything – or any form – is possible.

Taking an adventurous and experimental approach to working with clay, Nithiyendran has

developed a unique sculptural language. The artist hand-builds his clay figures using coils and slabbing techniques along with simple press moulds. Once firing is complete, he combines the clay components with materials such as polystyrene, cardboard and concrete, buttressing the larger forms with metal and wooden frames.

To achieve the baroque surfaces of his sculptures, Nithiyendran employs a variety of glazes, including luscious metallic lustres, along with objects such as jewellery, hair, twine, garden hoses, toy snakes, plastic ferns, and glitter. His mischievous approach to materials is indicated by his references to ‘room temperature glazes’ – that is, paint that he applies to his ceramics after they have been fired (a complete no no for purists).

Recently, the artist has been constructing unfired clay sculptures in the gallery space, leaving them to dry and crack during the course of the exhibition.

Such flouting of traditional techniques has not met with universal praise amongst the largely conservative ceramics community.

The medium is currently experiencing a surge of interest amongst contemporary artists, but this renewed attention towards a material traditionally associated with the craft sector has earned the ire of some practitioners, who decry what they see as an emphasis on “concept alone, at the expense of aesthetic sensibility and a solid skills-based platform,” or, to put it more bluntly, “kindergarten art.” 2 Nithiyendran’s irreverent treatment of materials is also evident in his approach to subject matter.

While his sculptures suggest the

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human, their monstrous bodies spill over the borders that delineate human form in bulbous, grotesque flourishes. Limbs and heads multiply, disproportionately large mouths grin and grimace; some figures brandish arms longer than their bodies, others lack appendages of any description. Penises sprout from heads and chests alongside similarly misallocated breasts, conflating the sexes in a joyous non-observance of anatomical correctness and male/female dichotomies. Swathed in shell necklaces and finished with human hair and false teeth, the sculptures have a totemistic air. Nithiyendran counteracts these nods to artistic ‘primitivism’ with a day-glo palette of brilliant glazes that bear as much relation to street art as they do to Art Brut and Cubism.

The most striking of these characters’ features are their gleeful facial expressions. Some sneer, some smirk, some have mouths like leering gashes, drawn from one side of the face to the other as if the whole head is about to be consumed by the force of its own laughter. It may not be textbook curatorial practice to describe art objects as sentient beings, nevertheless, these sculptures appear to be cackling at the audience, challenging us to be shocked by their raucous, improper physicality, and inviting us to laugh along with them.

Not surprisingly, these merry characters are often described in writing about Nithiyendran’s art practice as clown-like, but a more suggestive comparison would cast further back in time, from the white-faced, red-lipped jokers of modern circuses to their precursors, the rustic fools of Ancient Greek theatre and the

jesters of medieval courts. These performers put comedy to serious work, disrupting the status quo with mockery and ribald humour.

Employing a strategy of comic deflation rather than direct attack, they spoke truth to power in a way that the general populace could not.

In medieval Europe, the figure of the fool found its most powerful expression in the context of the carnival, an officially sanctioned feast or celebration during which accepted rules of conduct were suspended. During these festive periods, people who normally lived according to the social hierarchies of feudal society and the moral codes of the Catholic Church were given temporary dispensation to behave in ways that would be considered sacrilege, sedition and debauchery in everyday life.

This licence to overturn convention within the safe confines of a ritual space has resonances for Nithiyendran’s art practice, with its gallery-bound anatomical and material improprieties. The sculptural excesses of a contemporary artist may seem far removed from the revelry of medieval peasants, and yet they find a meeting point in the writings of the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, who in 1940 developed a theory of the carnivalesque to contextualise an artistic strategy he called “grotesque realism”. In the realm of literature to which Bakhtin applied this concept, grotesque imagery is a tool to critique repressive ideologies through parody and exaggeration. In the same way that carnival celebrations were a space apart from everyday life, a haven for questioning and rebellion, so too is art.

Mikhail Bakhtin identified two organising principles of the carnivalesque: laughter and what he delicately described as “the material bodily lower stratum”.3 This phrase stands in for a whole host of transgressive imagery, which more recent theorists have termed the ‘abject’.4 In Bakhtin’s formulation, the grotesque body, …is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation.5 The liberatory mechanisms of the carnival are enacted through a low comedy that plays upon bodily functions. The key to the humour in carnivalesque grotesque imagery is not just its defiance of conventions of classical beauty, but also its explicit references to those regions of the body where the border between corporeal interior and the external world is breached – where fluids and solids are either taken in or expelled.

With this in mind, it becomes evident that the bawdy humour in Nithiyendran’s artworks – the huge

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noses and rampant genitalia, the gaping mouths and proliferating breasts, the urinating and ejaculating figures, not to mention the giant ceramic turds – are a contemporary manifestation of a centuries-old tradition that employs the base and the bodily for comic effect, a comedy that contains pointed critique.

Inevitably, the abundance of phallic imagery in Nithiyendran’s work lends a frisson to its public reception, and In the Beginning has its fair share of penises – from the overt to the symbolic.

In a recent talk, the artist expounded upon his use of explicit imagery by referring to the 1934 painting by René Magritte entitled The Rape (Le Viol), which depicts a woman with breasts and genitals in place of her eyes and mouth.6 This troubling image is a potent symbol of the way women are often reduced to sexual objects in visual culture. Nithiyendran is interested to explore how this objectification applies to the gay male experience, where he finds, “You’re immediately identified by your sexuality, and it’s kind of like you’re wearing your genitals on your face.” 7 By placing phallic protrusions on the heads of his sculptures, Nithiyendran takes this implication to its absurd limits, and in the process confronts assumptions and prejudices.

The many phallic forms in Nithiyendran’s work are in part a reference to the Shiva Linga, an abstract representation of the Hindu deity Lord Shiva that signifies his generative power.

In the Beginning contains a monolithic bronze sculpture, the artist’s first foray into this medium, that recalls the pyramidal form of the Lingum. In a typically

over-the-top amplification of the phallic reference, Nithiyendran has covered this form in a writhing mass of serpents, penises and plastic squeeze bottles. In many cultures snakes symbolise fertility; in the Hindu tradition Shiva is often represented with a serpent coiled around his neck.

Nithiyendran describes the shape of this sculpture as a volcano, thereby adding the image of eruption to an already explosive monument to ejaculation. In this work, layers of cultural references and allusive imagery combine to represent a powerful creative life force. Lest all of this symbolism becomes too heavy handed, Nithiyendran lightens the tone with the addition of a cartoonish face that anthropomorphises the sculpture and invites us to laugh at its goofy grin and tumescent nose, even as we flinch from the anatomical precision of its surfaces.

Perhaps after chuckling over the anatomical exaggerations of Nithiyendran’s sculptures, viewers will think twice when walking past the monument to Captain James Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park, to give an example recently provided by the artist. 8 It is not too great a stretch of the imagination to recognise the phallic connotations of commemorative statues, especially this one with its towering stack of pedestals and pillars; but how often do we stop to think about the oppressions that these monolithic columns often celebrate – warfare, imperialism, subjugation? This is truly destructive symbolism, the sort that whitewashes colonial violence with the rubric of heroic male endeavour. How much more obscene is this insidious form of phallic imagery, how much more improper? And what else can we do in the face of it but laugh?

The underlying irony of all this overtly sexual imagery is that although we live in a culture that is still fundamentally phallocentric, the unabashed representation of the penis has not lost its capacity to shock.

How, the artist seems to be asking, can something so ever-present in our society – in sport, in politics, in advertising, in the entertainment industry – be so conspicuously invisible? And why do we barely raise an eyebrow at the sexualised female bodies so prominently displayed in art galleries, on billboards, and on television and cinema screens, and yet still find similar depictions of male bodies uncomfortable?

Nithiyendran’s sculptures redress this representational imbalance with playful excessiveness, revealing what is all around us but rarely seen.

While the politics of representation may be the primary subject of Nithiyendran’s work, he also pays close attention to the language of museological display. Nithiyendran’s first major installation at Artspace, Sydney in 2014 was comprised of a grouping of ceramic sculptures on customised plinths, arranged upon a tiled platform. The gridded geometry of the tiles provided a foil for the irregular silhouettes of the ceramic sculptures; their polished surfaces brought to mind antiseptic spaces such as hospitals and bathrooms, places where disorder is not welcome (but where, of course, all sorts of bodily ablutions, secretions and dissolutions occur). This incongruously pristine platform served a number of functions: as a formal contrast to the sculptures; a comment on the dual status of clay as a utilitarian

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> Untitled Figure 7 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, shells, false teeth

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and artistic medium; a metaphor for the tug-of-war between embarrassing corporeality and decorum; and, most simply, as a framing device – as a way to set the artworks apart.

Nithiyendran’s treatment of exhibition furniture reveals an understanding of the role that museum presentation plays in reifying the art object and emphasising its preciousness. In keeping with the artist’s unconventional approach to materials and form, the plinths in Nithiyendran’s work are rarely the unassuming white rectangles of traditional gallery display. They are mirrored or covered in corrugated cardboard, their straight edges dissolve into wavy lines, they veer improbably on a diagonal and, on the whole, refuse to politely blend into the walls.

In In the Beginning, Nithiyendran adds to his customised plinths some old-fashioned display cases from the Potter’s Classics & Archaeology Gallery, lighting them with coloured gels that inject a touch of disco. Borrowed objects from the University’s Cultural Collections inhabit the installation like interlopers from another exhibition. These objects have not been treated with the reverence one expects in a museum: framed works hang too high to be fully appreciated; an ancient Greek vase doubles as the threedimensional torso of a human figure chalked directly onto the wall; a lizard perches on top of a case that would normally protect it from curious hands; while, overhead, a taxidermied swan takes flight, her beak protruding above the painted section of the wall as if trying to escape the frame of the exhibition. Although

conventional wall labels accompany these borrowed works, in some cases they are mounted so high they are illegible. Their informative role thwarted, they become empty signifiers of the museum’s mission to educate the viewer.

Nithiyendran’s museological critique also extends to an interest in the history of art, which he both celebrates and subverts. His sculptural figures draw upon a long lineage of human representation in art and visual culture: ancient fertility figures, the idealised youths of Classical pottery, the animal/human hybrids of Indian religious sculpture, the deconstructed ‘primitives’ of Modernism, and more recently, in contemporary mass media, the luridly-coloured figures of animation and the sexualised bodies of pornography.

In In the Beginning, Nithiyendran references an iconic painting of early Modernism, Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). This image of a European woman lounging naked on a bed as her African maidservant delivers a gift of flowers has been analysed by many an art historian as a study in gender, race and class. 9 The painting was considered scandalous when first exhibited, not because of its subject’s lack of clothing, but because Olympia could not be mistaken for a politely allegorical nude. Retaining her subjecthood, she stares out at the viewer and dares us to see her as a self-possessed, unapologetically naked woman, one who controls her own sexuality and is aware of its power.

Nithiyendran turns the narratives of this painting inside out, transforming a heterosexual, white woman into a gay man of Asian and Anglo-Australian heritage, albeit

one whose gender is complicated by the inclusion of male and female characteristics. 10 Spray-painted directly onto the wall in a larger-than-life cartoonish flourish, further comedic notes are provided by a smiling green snake in place of Olympia’s choker, and a 19th century floral still life painting from the University Collection in place of her bouquet. Nithiyendran’s version of Olympia similarly poses challenges to the audience, but they are of a more post-modern kind: is this figure male or female; Caucasian or Other; the oppressor or the oppressed; high art or pop culture – and what are the value judgements inherent in these binary distinctions? If at the core of this work lies an exploration of difference, then the key unanswered question remains, “Different to what?” Nithiyendran’s work suggests that there is no standard, idealised human form.

All this anarchic and amorphous corporeality is essentially a celebration of ambiguity; a refusal to remain within traditional parameters of cultural and sexual identity.

Another question posed by the work is, what are we to make of the artist’s frequent insertions of himself into his own art practice?

Although still in the early stages of his career, the writing about Nithiyendran is already enshrining a core set of mythologies that encourage a reading of his work through his biography – his dual Sri Lankan and Anglo Australian heritage, his sexuality and his atheism, despite childhood visits to the local Hindu temple with his father and bible studies at his Catholic primary school.

Characterised in one review as “the

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bad boy of ceramics” (a moniker out of keeping with his consummate professionalism), this image of the artist as wild child is in part due to the content of Nithiyendran’s artwork, but also due to his sartorial flamboyance and his readiness to strike a pose, not just for the pages of Australian Art Collector, but also for edgy pop culture outlets such as Vice Magazine. 11 There is an element of hubris in the exhibition title In the Beginning, with its suggestion of the artist as god-like creator of his own universe. Peopling his world with an array of self-portraits and alter egos, Nithiyendran walks the line between narcissism and self-mockery. The gallery walls in In the Beginning are branded with the artist’s name in 4-metre high graffiti tags, but this megalomania is punctured by the spray-painted proclamation “Ramesh sucks”. At times, it feels as if Nithiyendran’s work perpetuates cliches about exoticism, validating the conventional attributes of the Other as decorative, colourful, excessive, disorderly, and sexualised. However, in light of the knowing humour in Nithiyendran’s practice, these overplayed attributes could alternatively be read as another instance of self-parody. Nithiyendran pre-empts the stereotypes through which both he and his artwork could be interpreted, and inflates them to the point where they burst.

In considering Nithiyendran’s exaggerated performance of himself in his art – the simultaneous self-aggrandizement and selfdeprecation – we are brought back full circle to the ambivalent push and pull of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque.

The carnival’s positive, regenerative emphasis on laughter

as a creative force, one that tears down in order to rebuild, has great resonances for Nithiyendran’s art practice, particularly in this exhibition with its framing narrative of creation myths.12 In the Beginning is overseen by two patron saints, Shiva and Kali, male and female counterparts in Hindu mythology who signify the principles of death and rebirth.

Primarily known as the destroyer of the cosmos, Shiva is also recognised as a regenerator, in acknowledgement that death opens the door to new life. He lays waste to the universe in order to re-create it. Kali has a ferocious reputation – one of the Indian folk paintings included by Nithiyendran in this exhibition depicts Shiva throwing himself under her feet to halt a fierce killing spree – but Kali annihilates the body in order to liberate the ego and the spirit. These symbols of violent renewal are central to an understanding of the contradictions in Nithiyendran’s practice.

Within the space of the museum, through the unruly grotesqueries of his artworks, Nithiyendran mounts an attack on the continued power of cultural norms. His rebellious bodies tear down the defining markers of identity in order to make them anew, in revitalised formations that suggest a radical freedom to self-create and self-define. Through playful reconfigurations of the artistic conventions of materials, representation, iconography, display, and his own persona, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran encourages a laughter that both wounds and heals, that demolishes the constraints of tradition and clears the ground for new possibilities.

Mikhail Bakhtin described the grotesque as an “ever unfinished, ever creating body”: 13 The grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming. The relation to time is one determining trait of the grotesque image. The other indispensable trait is ambivalence.

For in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of metamorphosis.14

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1 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélene Iswolsky, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 123.

2 Ted Secombe, ‘Thoughts on our Industry’, The Journal of Australian Ceramics, Vol. 54, No. 3, 2015, p. 80.

3 Bakhtin, p. 84.

4 While there are more recent critical lenses through which to view the grotesque, notably Julia Kristeva’s theory of ‘the abject’ (The Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) and Barbara Creed’s analysis of ‘monstrous’ male and female figures in popular cinema (Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny, Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2005 and The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London, New York: Routledge, 1993), Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque maintains its relevance through its emphasis on the regenerative mechanisms of laughter.

5 Bakhtin, p. 26.

6 Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, public lecture, Mud Men, RMIT University, Melbourne, 16 August 2016.

7 ibid.

8 ibid.

9 See particularly T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, London: Thames and Hudson, 1985 and Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art, London, New York: Routledge, 1988.

10 Nithiyendran is not the first to appropriate Édouard Manet’s Olympia.

Paul Cézanne painted two versions in the early 1870s and Paul Gaugin tackled the subject in 1892, inverting the racial narrative of the original with a Tahitian Olympia. More recently Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura photographed himself in the pose of Olympia, while Australian artist Julie Rrap invited audience members to take the pose themselves on a bronze platform that modelled Olympia’s curves in the negative. Manet pre-empted this chain of art historical references, taking his cues from Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), who in turn was quoting Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510).

11 Dylan Rainforth, ‘Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran wins $50,000 Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Art Award’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 August 2015, accessed November 2016, <http://www. smh.com.au/entertainment/art-anddesign/ramesh-mario-nithiyendran-wins50000-sidney-myer-fund-australianceramic-art-award-20150825-gj6y1c. html>.

12 Mikhail Bahktin was at pains to distinguish the negativity of modern satire, which distanced itself from its object, from carnivalesque laughter, which is self-implicating and inclusive: “…this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives… it is also directed at those who laugh…”

(Bakhtin, pp. 11-12).

13 Bakhtin, p. 26.

14 ibid., p. 24.

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< Untitled Figure 4 (detail) 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, shells, wooden beads, false teeth

< Untitled Figure 2 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, enamel, Indian human hair 19

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<> Untitled Figure 4 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, shells, wooden beads, false teeth

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List of works

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran Pewter Dickhead 2 (Archipelago series) 2015 earthenware, glaze 100 x 49.5 x 41 cm Plinth: MDF, cardboard 100 x 43 x 45 cm Recipient of the 2015 Sidney Myer Ceramic Art Award Shepparton Art Museum Shithead 3 (Study for Temple) 2015 earthenware, glaze, gold, platinum lustre 84 x 65 x 50 cm Plinth: MDF, marble tile, Perspex 94 x 42 x 40 cm Recipient of the 2015 Sidney Myer Ceramic Art Award Shepparton Art Museum Silver Dickhead 3 (Archipelago series) 2015 earthenware, glaze 51 x 55 x 55 cm Recipient of the 2015 Sidney Myer Ceramic Art Award Shepparton Art Museum

Untitled (bronze) 2016 bronze 100 x 80 x 85 cm Untitled Figure 2 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, enamel, Indian human hair 66 x 23 x 17 cm Untitled Figure 4 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, shells, wooden beads, false teeth 92 x 23 x 30 cm Untitled Figure 5 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, Indian human hair, shells, wooden beads, plastic fern 130 x 34 x 27 cm Untitled Figure 6 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, porcelain, enamel 63 x 30 x 19 cm

Vessel Stack 2015 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, glass 112 x 32 x 31 cm Collection of Dr Terry Wu, Melbourne

Untitled Figure 7 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, shells, false teeth 64 x 28 x 26 cm

Self-portrait 1 2016 mixed media on paper 50.6 x 40.5 cm

Untitled Figure 8 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, porcelain, enamel, shells, false teeth 82 x 22 x 20 cm

Self-portrait 2 2016 mixed media on paper 50.6 x 40.5 cm Self-portrait 3 2016 mixed media on paper 50.6 x 40.5 cm Self-portrait 4 2016 mixed media on paper 50.6 x 40.5 cm

Untitled Figure 9 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, enamel, shells, wooden beads 71 x 30 x 20 cm Untitled Figure 10 2016 earthenware, glaze, underglaze, gold lustre, shells 70 x 33 x 19 cm

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The University of Melbourne Cultural Collections Untitled Figure 11 2016 earthenware, polystyrene, glaze, Indian human hair, porcelain, enamel, shells, wooden beads, false teeth 164.5 x 115 x 38 cm Untitled Figure 12 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, resin, shells, wooden beads 120 x 50 x 33 cm Untitled Figure 13 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, enamel 130 x 55 x 43 cm Untitled Figure 14 2016 unfired clay, synthetic wig, glitter, acrylic, garbage bag, plastic fern 105 x 145 x 45 cm Untitled Figure 15 2016 unfired clay 30 x 30 x 80 cm Untitled Wall Drawing 2016 chalk, blackboard paint Untitled Wall Painting 2016 enamel, marker pen

All works courtesy of the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney unless otherwise noted

Ceramic Jug Cyprus, c. 2300 - 2200 BCE The University of Melbourne Art Collection, Classics and Archaeology Collection. Purchased from the Australian Institute of Archaeology, 1987 1987.0260 Ceramic Trefoil Oinochoe Greece, c. 420 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 400 BCE The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Classics and Archaeology Collection. John Hugh Sutton Memorial Bequest 1931.0004 Ceramic rim, handle sherd The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Classics and Archaeology Collection 0000.0362 Philip Wilson Steer Flowers in a glass vase 1892 oil on wood The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Gift of James R. McGregor 1969.0245

Unknown artist (Madhubani, India) Kali, the black goddess 1982 brush and ink on paper The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Purchased by the Department of Indian Studies, 1982 1982.0063 Asian Water Monitor (Varanus salvator) taxidermy specimen 133 x 18 x 32 cm Tiegs Zoology Museum Collection Monkey skull (species unknown) skeletal material 9.5 x 6.5 x 6.5 cm Tiegs Zoology Museum Collection Research swan taxidermy specimen 100 x 46 x 26 cm Tiegs Zoology Museum Collection Tiger Snake (Notechis scutatus) fluid filled specimen in glass jar 13 x 13 x 21 cm Tiegs Zoology Museum Collection

Untitled (Hindu god) not dated concrete The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Purchased by the Faculty of Architecture, 1967 1967.0014 Unknown artist (Madhubani, India) Goddess Kali dancing on Lord Shiva 1982 brush and ink on paper The University of Melbourne Art Collection. Purchased by the Department of Indian Studies, 1982 1982.0059

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< Untitled Figure 9 2016 earthenware, glaze, gold lustre, platinum lustre, enamel, shells, wooden beads

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Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran In the Beginning Curated by Jacqueline Doughty Published by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, on the occasion of the exhibition Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran: In the Beginning, 22 November 2016–26 February 2017.

All images unless otherwise noted: Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran (born Sri Lanka 1988)

In the Beginning 2016 Installation view, Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne

Text © 2016, the authors and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne Images © 2016, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran (studio photographs) and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne (installation photographs) Acknowledgements The artist would like to thank Mal Wood Foundry, Angus Gardner, Fred Fowler, Terry Wu, P & S Design and Construction, The Tiegs Zoology Museum, University of Melbourne, Shepparton Art Museum, Jenny Orchard, Ursula Sullivan + Joanna Strumpf, Nicholas Shoebridge, Gertrude Contemporary, Kari McInneny-McRae, Caelan Renfree Dyer.

This catalogue is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the prior permission of the publisher. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Ian Potter Museum of Art or the publisher.

ISBN

978 0 7340 5334 3

Design by 5678 Design Printed by Adams Print, Melbourne Installation photographs by Christian Capurro: front cover, pp. 6-7, 8, 17, 18-19, 26-27, 28-29, 31, 32-33, 35 Studio photographs by Simon Hewson: pp. 2, 4, 13, 20, 21, 22-23, 30, back cover The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia Email potter-info@unimelb.edu.au www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au Patron Lady Potter AC

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> Back cover Untitled Figure 10 (detail) 2016 earthenware, glaze, under glaze, gold lustre, shells