The Home Inside Our Mind is the first-ever Malaysian showcase for Indonesian ceramic artist, Sekarputi Sidhiawati (known to friends as “Puti”). The show features a mix of wall-mounted and three-dimensional ceramic works. Taken together, the works are an externalisation of Puti’s attempts to uncover her true self amongst the demands of her shifting identities and roles as mother, wife, artist, and business owner (to name a few). 

Puti’s preoccupations with the stories of women and the domestic are reflected in both her choice of medium and the final pieces. Ceramics are often associated with women and the domestic sphere, and here Puti’s expression of her inner landscape takes the form of sculpted book covers with titles that reflect distinct thematic concerns. The titles of these books, such as “How to Break A Pattern” or “Mistakes Over Mistakes”, could conceivably be found on the bookshelf of any young woman trying to improve herself, and they hint at the friction that this journey into the self has created. While the bright and thoughtful use of colours hint at happier growth, Puti resists easy answers to her search. 

The three-dimensional ceramics in the show are made with the pinching and coiling handbuilding technique and demonstrate a shift towards sculpture. These works feature prominent holes that represent Puti’s dogged dissatisfaction despite her pleasure in the process and her achievements. In this way, the works resist closure and the simplistic solutions of self-help literature.

Opening reception: Thursday, 28 September, from 4pm onwards

About the Artist

Sekarputi Sidhiawati (b. 1986, Jakarta) is a visual artist who creates stories about the empowerment of women in the domestic setting and at the intersection of culture. She works primarily with ceramic, a material that is often associated with the home and women in general. 

Her formal education was at the Faculty of Art and Design ITB-Ceramic Art studio. She is now known as the founder of the studio Arta Derau, while consistently working in the art world. After working in Bandung for a time, she moved to Bali to expand her ceramic studio business. With her works that are centered around issues related to women, Puti has been a finalist in several fine art awards such as the Soemardja Art Award (2010) and the Bandung Contemporary Art Award (2013). She has joined several prestigious exhibitions including the Jakarta Contemporary Ceramic Biennale, National Gallery of Indonesia (2014); Temperature Affect, Museum of Fine Arts and Ceramics Jakarta (2017); Manifesto, National Gallery of Indonesia (2017); Termasuk, Darren KnightGallery Australia (2018); Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljublana, Slovenia (2019). The Home Inside Our Mind is her second solo exhibition and her first exhibition in Malaysia.

EXHIBITION ESSAY

By Deborah Germaine Augustin

“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.

INSTALLATION SHOTS

Photos courtesy of Kenta Chai.