Collector's trash

Trust us, after you've seen artist Haribabu Natesan's work you'll never look at a plastic fork or damaged CD or a useless computer or a bent safety pin with the same eyes. Possibilities, that's what this artist sees when he looks at anything useless or broken.

Nuts, hooks, phone dials, broken zips, buckles, springs, toothpicks, mangled CPUs, monitors, hard disks have all somehow managed to find a place in Natesan's art. He has made recycling into an art form and is now exhibiting his collection of mixed material sculptures at the Fossils Art Show at Out Of The Blue, Bandra.


u00a0
Best out of waste
It all started with a passion for collecting useless things and experiment with what forms they could take. "After seeing what I manage to create out of junk, my friends offer all their junk to me. My house is full of all these objects," says Natesan who also visits the Sunday market in Ahmedabad once every three months to acquire junk. "Broken things seemed to just call out to me to take care of them. I've been doing this part-time for over three years and full-time for the last eight months," says the NID postgraduate in animation film design who quit stable animation work to continue pottering around with his useless items at home.u00a0

Damaged but not useless
He explains, "A lot of people tell me that it's bad for Vaastu to keep so many damaged objects at home, that it attracts negative energy. But I don't agree. In that way, even furniture is actually a dead tree. I look at my art as a way of breathing life into lifeless things." And technically it is true too. Natesan has used his animation training to design some animal sculptures that can be used for stop motion animation work and could even move with the help of robotronics.

An end to recycling
"I've feel strongly about issues like global warming and recycling. We spend a lot of energy in recycling stuff like plastic and iron. I feel that when you recycle things into art, you also put an end to the recycling and all the effort and energy spent in it. Although, I don't do 100 per cent sustainable recycled art (I need to use glue and boards and stuff like that.) This is a great platform to showcase my work. I hope it will generate some positive feedback," he says proudly. The artist now looks forward to some Salvador Dali-like creations, which combine molten iron, eagle feathers and used hard disks. But that's the subject of another exhibition.