An open-air art haven in a temple town

Located between the temples of Khajuraho and the wilds of Bandhavgarh in the heart of Madhya Pradesh, lies the village of Ichol. A stone’s throw from Maihar, and an ancient temple town, it is home to a beautiful Sharda Devi temple. It was here that one of the greatest maestros of the sarod, sitar and shehnai, Ustad Allauddin Khan, established the Maihar Gharana, and trained various musicians, including Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Annapurna Devi.

A recent addition to this landscape is Art Ichol, a unique platform for creating, sharing and promoting the creative arts.

Conceived by art patron Ambica Beri, Art Ichol is a multidisciplinary arts centre where resident artists, craft enthusiasts, writers and photographers can collaborate. The first thing one notices is its peaceful and soothing vibe owing mostly to the calm serenity of its surroundings.

Beri, who owns Gallery Sanskriti in Kolkata, has had Bengal artists, musicians and dancers visit Maihar and host informal workshops annually since 1997.

In 2011, she came across the land which now houses Art Ichol. A medieval chhatri and baoli were all that existed there at the time. It took Beri more than three years to build it completely with guidance from her architect father. The Centre finally opened its doors in 2015 for Indian as well as international artists to create in different mediums.

The Centre’s most striking feature is its large open-air sculpture park, with exquisite pieces of art strewn all over it. These include works by several well-known artists, such as Satish Gupta, Jayasri Burman, Gigi Scaria, Arunkumar H G, Madhvi Subrahmanian, Laxma Goud, Bhupesh Kavadia, and Narayan Sinha, among others —  all of whom have stayed here in the past and left their works as part of their residencies.

“The Centre’s aesthetics borrow heavily from the cement plants and limestone quarries that abound the industrial area, in terms of the many artworks devised from repurposed scrap and recycled waste,” explained Beri.

These include old railway tracks, doors, conveyor belts, pulleys, signal lights, pipes, valves, electric meters, abandoned kilns, ship anchors, chimneys and cylinders. In 2017, as a homage to the humble brick makers of Ichol, French ceramist Jacques Kaufmann used old bricks to create a fascinating Brick Temple with one brick suspended in the air. Possibly the most imposing sculpture in the garden is a huge metal creation by Paresh Maity in 2019, an artistic tribute to the city of Maihar.