EXHIBITION ESSAY
The Home Inside Our Mind: A solo exhibition by Sekarputi Sidhiawati
30 September – 5 November 2023
by Deborah Germaine Augustin, September 2023
“The ability to bend an inch at a time while seeming to stand up straight is a useful and gendered skill. Most women I know do it regularly,” writes Isabel Kaplan in her viral essay ‘My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer’. She continues: “They bend until they’re pretzeled and then blame themselves for the body aches.” Artist Sekarputi Sidhiawati is all too familiar with this pretzling. As a mother, artist, business manager to her artist husband and business owner, to name just a few of her many roles, she has had to put her art on the back burner to attend to domestic affairs.
Around 2015, she returned to ceramics after a five-year hiatus. Ceramics were at once a practical way to make money and a natural material for an artist reconciling her artistic ambitions with her role as a wife and mother. As a Javanese Muslim woman, Sekarputi grew up with the idea that a woman must serve her husband. Similarly, ceramics occupy a lower tier in the hierarchy of artistic materials. They are often relegated to crafts rather than capital-A art. The craft aspect of ceramics and their tie to the domestic space also attracted her to the material.
In The Home Inside Our Mind, Sekarputi searches for her self outside of the many roles ascribed to her. The pieces in this exhibition are an intimate exploration of her inner landscape through a distinctly feminine point of view.
Motherhood in particular has sparked some of the major developments in her career. One of those landmark moments is the genesis of ceramic books in her work, a recurring motif that first appeared in 2017 when she was pregnant with her second child. But the seed for the ceramic books began in 2013 as she recovered from post-partum depression. A counsellor encouraged her to write in a journal, but Sekarputi resisted it and merely wrote about her daily activities. “Keeping a diary is very cringe…for me [before 2013]” she says. However, once she began to write honestly in her diary about her feelings she found a new way to communicate with herself and exorcise her fears. The idea for ceramic books was planted then. Four years later, she realised her dream at her last show in Bandung before moving to Bali.
The books in The Home Inside Our Mind take the form of wall-mounted pieces grouped around different thematic concerns. In “Radial Perception”, the colours shift from a deep red and orange book in the centre to the colours of the rainbow until the books on the outer edge are light purple. Sekarputi conceived of “Radial Perception” as a symbol of growth gained through adversity. Both the colour gradient and the text on the books represent a transformation through difficulty. However, there is no easy or complete answer that she lands on. The book at the centre of this piece is titled “How to Break a Pattern”, and books close to the centre express hardship with titles like “Strange Feeling Ahead” and imperatives like “Let Me In”. Yet, even the books at the outer edges of the piece hint at continued difficulties like “Agree to Disagree”, “This Shall Pass” and “It Hurts Loving So Hard”.
This lack of closure is also explored in the five sculptural, free-standing works presented in the exhibition. Here, Sekarputi utilises a pinching and coiling hand-building technique. The works are more sculptural than pottery and harken back to when she first grew bored of making functional ceramics. The organic shape of these pieces almost resembles a coral reef or caves. Adding to their cavern-like nature are the holes that Sekarputi formed in each piece. Nestled in the holes and crevices of the pieces are tiny naked female figures that represent the artist as she grapples with her continued dissatisfaction. Sekarputi finished the pieces with a glossy surface to emphasise the thumb strokes she left behind while making the work. The preservation of physical imperfections is yet another way in which the work resists any satisfactory conclusion. Instead, it acknowledges the persistent dissatisfactions in the search for self and the importance of process.
As a whole, the show is a clever reversal of the domestic space. As the exhibition title suggests, Sekarputi is looking for home, or inner peace to use a cliché, in a world where the ideal of femininity remains unattainable. Women today increasingly understand that they can’t have it all. Yet the pressure to do so remains. The Home Inside Our Mind can be seen as an externalisation of the cracks in the self that the expectations of domestic life exert. That the artist does so through a medium traditionally associated with the home but removes its utilitarian function is a perfect encapsulation of her refusal to remain in the roles traditionally created for her.
— DEBORAH GERMAINE AUGUSTIN