Trupti Patel

Trupti Patel was born in Nairobi and brought up in Baroda and Mt. Abu, before obtaining her Masters in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda. In 1983-85, the British Council and Charles Wallace Scholarship allowed her to pursue an M A in Ceramics at the Royal College of Art in London before she began her work as a freelance artist until her return to Vadodara in 1997.
Trupti started her work as a sculptor interested in the use of clay/earth. Choosing a material linked to the cycle of life - coming from the earth and returning to it, she refers to the use of the material symbolising Human existence and dependence on it. Her early works started with making life size terracotta heads and figures, largely female- representing situations in life, gestural in intuitive forms to reference an experienced essence. Her realisation of material matter to its related meaning empowered her to appropriate other materials for their inherent frame of reference. The potent symbolism of raw soil with its organic history of location and geography triggered an interest for use primarily in reference to identity of place. Since 2005 earths of specific places, seeds, food crops, ash, water as well as planting activity of indigenous plants at specific sites became a marker of identity through the medium of Landscape. Recognising the intrinsic identity of raw earth made into pigment and painted as Terracruda over a fired ceramic form, it pushed towards an exploratory use of material addressing the made with the already existent. This juxtapositions a dialogue to engage quite frankly with complicated issues around existence and identity. These themes of the perennial coordinates of the human condition are explored through referencing the varying identities of place, race, class, caste, of political and contemporary cultures that are negotiated in both the collective as well as private contexts.