The art of the scrap

We profile artist Gopal Namjoshi who creates beautiful installations from discarded metal.

Your first reaction on encountering a heap of scrap metal would be to ship it to a melting unit for recycling. But when artist Gopal Namjoshi comes across metal chains, cogs, wheels, rods, nuts, bolts, sheets and other broken unusable metal pieces, his immediate reaction is to look at ways to piece them together to come up with a spectacular art installation.

Namjoshi firmly believes that every element, even if it be scrap metal waiting to be discarded or melted down, comes with its own inherent beauty, language and message when used appropriately and stationed in the right space. A gold medallist Fine Arts graduate from the School of Arts, Jaipur, Namjoshi has, for the last two decades and a half, been creating art forms and giant installations using materials that have been essentially scrapped. His metal installations feature both in indoor and outdoor spaces.

Namjoshi stumbled into metal scrap accidentally when he was out to repair his fairly old scooter. “While waiting at the mechanic shop, I happened to pick up a few random metal scrap pieces and tried to piece them together to create a meaningful composition,” he states. “What emerged initially was too abstract, but the effort pointed to the possibility of creating something more meaningful and artistic that people could relate to.”

The first image he thence created was of a cow where the metal pieces were welded together using a local welder. “When I started working with scrap metal, I was unsure about how to fuse them to create the compositions I had in mind. Worse, when I tried to source metal scrap, the components were offered in bulk, totally baffling me.” However, after working on it continuously for over 10 days, Namjoshi figured out a way to guide the local welder to weld the pieces in the designed format.

Connecting to ecology

Incidentally, Namjoshi’s art forms connect strongly to ecology as well as the life forms that humans interact with on a daily basis. The cow and the calf, which are omnipresent in his installations, are a case in point.

Other animal forms similarly feature in his installations, such as the elephant, the deer, peacock, insects, birds, trees, to name a few, together pointing to their peaceful co-existence in nature. His bio-park metal installations draw attention to the plunder of our forests and their impact on ecology. “Very little is done by the urbanite to address this plunder and the ensuing irreversible damage to the ecology. The bio-parks were created to spark this awareness,” he elaborates.

His recent metal installation of the Eagle Owl, found in the northern Aravalli range, at the entry point to Gurugram from Delhi, is in tune with this intention. The installation, standing 8.5 feet tall, is an awe-inspiring structure made of metal scrap weighing 14,000 kg, with a depth of 11 feet and wings that span 14 feet. The eagle is perched at the entry gate, majestically poised to take off. “The eagle owl is an endangered species and placing it at such a vantage point hopefully draws attention to the irreversible ecological damage that our irresponsible acts commit,” adds Namjoshi.

Gender codes

Interestingly Namjoshi’s installations are not confined to animal forms and ecological leanings alone, but extend to address cultural issues and long prevailing dogmas, especially those related to gender issues.

His exhibit in early 2020 at IGNCA for International Women’s Day, themed Decoding Patriarchal Codes, focuses explicitly on this, with an art installation titled, ‘Ja Simran Jaa’. The installation depicts a woman leaving behind household chores and charging out in a ‘masculine’ motorcycle, exercising loudly her right to break free from the conventional roles assigned to women and enter vocations that were once considered taboo.

Stepping beyond metal

Metal is however not the only medium that Namjoshi works with, his art installations extending to recycled paper, vinyl, even edible items. In the Jaipur Literature Festival, Namjoshi put up a light installation christened ‘Glowrious’, featuring 100 lit structures that were made using polypropylene sheets. Similarly, he came up with an 80-feet long installation, ‘Spring is in the air’ using crepe paper and vinyl sheets and another installation using edible chocolate that earned him a mention in the Limca Book of Records for the ‘Largest Edible Art Installation’.