Nep Sidhu: an intellect of the hand
Eclectic Toronto artist mounting his first major solo hometown show
Six days from his opening and standing beneath an unfinished tapestry that covers the broadest wall of his Malvern studio, artist Nep Sidhu says he will work until sunrise once more.
It has been a sleepless fortnight as he makes final preparations for a major solo exhibition. To manage, he’s finetuned his diet, how he naps and his training regimen. He approaches the task like an athlete. (Not incidentally, his family runs a boxing academy for girls in Chakar, India.) Similar to the precepts of that martial art, undergirding his vast creative practice, there is a tremendous sense of discipline.
Across media — be it metalwork, sculpture, jewelry design, rug-making or the couture sported onstage and off by artists, futurists and mystics like Shabazz Palaces and Erykah Badu — Sidhu is intensely committed to craft. The 40-year-old practitioner is a student of its histories and techniques. It is his vehicle for time travel, bridging various ancestries to the future imaginary. He employs it to connect what, on the surface, seem like far-flung cultures and geographies. He shares it excitedly and generously, fostering creative partnerships with collaborators around the world.
Beyond all conceptual interests, however, it provides him a distinct and special kind of intelligence: one garnered only by a thousand hours of making. Call it an intellect of the hand. And at the moment, his are covered in gold paint and busy building.
Although his art has featured prominently in major shows at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Aga Khan Museum and the Art Gallery of York University, Medicine for a Nightmare (they called, we responded) is his first hometown solo exhibition. It opened Friday at Mercer Union.
Sidhu began working at his family’s Scarborough metal shop as a welder when he was a teenager. (His father began there as a welder, too, when he emigrated from England, eventually partnering with the other owners.) In his family’s house, the artist says, work ethic was always an outsize value. As he busied himself learning his father’s trade, he grew a partic- ular attachment to the material: what it could do but also what it represents. Metal holds a special place in Punjabi culture, he says, as Sikh steel was revered for its strength, life-saving during historical times of religious persecution.
Seated over a table of intricately crafted and machined components — amulets, medallions and other adornments — Sidhu traces the history of Wootz steel. That specific metallurgical technology travelled to Punjab from the Chera dynasty of Sri Lanka, taught to them by the Rwandans, he says, “who were known to have incredible smelting practices.”
On an amulet he holds up, designed to hang from a dental grill, Sidhu has engraved the bow-and-arrow insignia of the Cheras as well as the embroidered sheath of a Rwandan blade. Written in Gurmukhi, a Punjabi script, he has etched also “Ek Onkar,” the symbol representing “one supreme reality.” It opens the Sikh holy text the Mool Mantar, Sidhu explains, “a very simple few lines, but the absolute tenets of Sikhism.”
With this series of works, comprised of two “medicine hats” belonging to Badu, which will sit on busts called “superstructures” by collaborator Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, and adorned all over with Sidhu’s ornate metalwork, the artist intends to explore material as a carrier and communicator of knowledge, he says. He wants the steel to tell its history and that of its makers.
The engraving is also an act of preservation. A key foundation of Medicine for a Nightmare is Operation Blue Star, a military attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, in June 1984, as well as the subsequent 1984 Sikh Massacre. During the assault, the books and manuscripts of the temple’s reference library were stolen. Carving Sikh knowledge into steel, Sidhu says, memorializes the atrocities and acts of erasure. But what he hopes to remember most through the art, he says, are the codes and systems that have always sustained Sikhs as a people. Hence, “Ek Onkar.”
While returning to the tapestry, and quietly appraising the work ahead, Sidhu says, “You have to be careful when you’re working with trauma.”
The roughly 2.5-by-5.5-metre wool and jute composition is an exuberant display: a medley of handsome carpets, richlooking textiles and blades of all shapes “dancing,” as Sidhu describes them. At the centre, two men stand before a golden doorway, representing the shrine at Hazur Sahib, where nightly the swords of the 10th Sikh master are shown to the public.
These objects — the guru’s swords — aren’t mere jewels or relics, the artist explains, rather they are receptacles of his people’s history and stores of the knowledge that has fortified them.
“If you’re trying to take part in the act of healing,” Sidhu continues, “then I think you also have to look at the next steps beyond trauma. You have to find the places that exist after trauma.” Beyond the men and through the golden door, the artist has sketched the opening as a portal. This is the section he will work on next.