October 26, 2002

Marjorie Husain speaks to David Chalmers Alesworth, head of the foundation course at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi

In a collection of recent works shown at Karachi’s Canvas Gallery in October, David Chalmers Alesworth dismantles the components of reality and reconstructs them in his own highly individual way: zinc plated metal ‘war toys’ referred to homily domestic objects, milk urns, antennas, funnels and sieves heavily studded with rivets. Creating a phenomenon that is nurtured by the troubled times, Alesworth diffuses the horrific implications by presenting them as familiar objects in our lives.

The varied scales of missiles that stand together on bowed legs create the feel of a ‘group’ image; a family getting together for a photograph to place in the album. As has become his practice, the artist placed them around town to note the public reactions to the pieces, trying them out in milk and fruit shops where they were viewed with mixed reactions by shopkeepers and passersby alike.

The metal teddy bears are more disquieting, reminding us of the countless blameless victims of aggression. The popular toy of childhood takes on the nightmare mien of a life threatening ploy aimed at the innocent, travesties of the cuddly toy translated in hard metal.

The sculptor refers to his latest work as a continuation of an enduring enquiry and celebration of Pakistan’s urban street culture. “Concerns of nuclearization and environmental degradation remain at the centre of my practice. Domestic connotations of food processing and storage continue in the vein of Domestic Appliance of 1998. These works are based on the somewhat out-moded but delightful practice of producing galvanized steel plate — an activity that happens all over the city, producing funnels, jugs, milk churns sieves, kulfi containers and myriad other forms not addressed adequately by the plastics industry.”

Referring to his work as part celebration of the material and process and part critique of the dubious and potentially disastrous aspiration to weaponize/modernize, David Alesworth cites his working vision over the last two decades referring to the work of 1993, Two Bombs Kiss, and the collaborative project produced in 1996 Heart Mahal.

Elaborating on his sculpture he explained: “A horrified obsession with weapon technology and early nuclear devices led to these playful and perverse takes on the model missiles that have proliferated on roundabouts throughout Karachi. In addition, the work draws largely from my interest in Victorian and archaic technologies, the pathos of technology of the past and built-in obsolescence. A celebration of technology and its failures, from the short sighted Hubble telescope or the supposedly unsinkable Titanic, this body of work comments on the human side of technology: its humour, hostility, sexuality, and fragility.”

Discussing his own interest in the local markets and all kinds of merchandise and his desire to interest his students in market crafts and activities, Alesworth speaks with animation of the fantastic vitality he finds in the craftsmen.

“The wonderful thing about Karachi,” he says, “is the way the wood market is the wood market, and the metal market is the metal market, and life and commerce and everything are bound up together. I often go with the weirdest projects to people and anywhere else in the world they would laugh you down, but here I find the craftsmen immediately start engaging with it; they think about it and start contributing to it. People who work with their hands are very open. Anyone who is working with a process and is excited by that process tends to be more open.”

Quite at home talking to the craftsmen in the narrow, busy markets of Karachi, David Alesworth grew up in a ‘green belt’ area of England, Oxshot, in Surrey, where in autumn the pavements glow golden with layers of fallen leaves. Here as a child he would ride his bicycle to school followed by the sound of rustling leaves. His elder brother became a doctor but he was always directed towards the arts.

After completing two years with the Epsom School of Art and Design he joined the Wimbledon School of Art and completed a four-year B.A. Honours in Fine Art Sculpture, in 1980. In common with other practising artists in England, after his graduation, Alesworth took on a number of jobs while he studied his options. He did landscaping, helped out in a supermarket on Saturdays and worked in a telephone exchange. Awarded the coveted Picker Fellowship in Sculpture, he spent another two years at the Kingston University where he met his wife-to-be, Durriya Kazi.

In 1983 he was initially delighted to be taken on as lecturer by the renowned Glasgow School of Art, but the reality proved far from the expectations. “Having had the luxury and importance of the Picker Fellowship it was not a great situation”.

In his early twenties, keen and eager to communicate, Alesworth found a cool atmosphere. “It was before Glasgow became the European City of Culture. There was a lot of hostility towards ‘Smart Alec’ Englishmen and attempts to communicate with colleagues were rebuffed.”

He developed a great rapport with his students and that was also resented. “It was a gruelling time, it was a maturing time. I worked at the Glasgow art school for two days in the week and was really on the ‘breadline’ and I stayed for two years. Then Durriya and I married. We took on mortgage a tiny pebble-dash cottage in Wimbledon, and set out keeping up with the payments. Durriya got a job with a film company and I worked all the hours of the day. I was a ‘tree surgeon’, loping off branches and treating barks. With a friend from art school I set up a landscaping business, and we shared a studio on Eel Pie Island in Twickenham in Surrey, where we would get away to, to do our own work whenever possible.”

Alesworth visited Pakistan for the first time in ‘82 and was amazed at the diversity of Karachi. “At that time I was so sure of what I was doing, and I was basically a late Constructivist. I saw a sort of lineage for Russian Constructivism, English Vorticism, the whole St. Martin School, post-Anthony Caro effort, Eduardo Chiliad the Basque artist, David Smith in the States, Gonzales in Spain, Picasso experiments: I saw it all as the language of the age and the only thing one could be doing if one was serious about what one was doing.

“I came to Karachi and was not prepared for the effects of the culture shock. My concerns suddenly seemed so irrelevant and so parochial, so insular, so superficial, and it really blew me away. Then in ‘86 we came to attend Durriya’s brother’s wedding, and while here I was offered the opportunity to landscape the Murshid Hospital in Hub.

“At that time my landscape business in England was running and my partner, who had been through art school with me had decided to retrain as a landscape architect and that’s what he is doing today. It had been a bad winter in England; I had just come from doing the most enormous paving job in my life and almost killed myself in the attempt to get the money to come here. So I said ‘Fine’, and I took on the job and we stayed on for four months. Then I went back and wound up the business. We settled in Karachi and we had this fantastic studio but I wasn’t getting much time in it, then in ‘89 I started with the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and gradually wound down the landscape business.”

While initiating a lively sculpture department at the IVSAA the sculptor attempted to open his work to the environment in different ways: “I was very excited about the possibilities of materials and the process. There were other possibilities less easy to define, of attitudes to space and material, language of form, so many things that are still impossible to categorize, that still make it worth while living here for me,” he says.

In 1994 David Alesworth was elected to Associate of Royal Society of British Sculptors (ARBS). The same year he, along with Durriya, worked with local truck painters and the staff and students of the Karachi School of Art on an art caravan project creating a mobile art display that travelled from Karachi to Islamabad. In ‘95 he initiated an Artist’s Newsletter, and in ‘96 collaborated on the Heart Mahal project put together to commemorate ‘Containers ‘96’, Art Across Oceans, held on the docks of Copenhagen.

The year 1997 was full of activity. Alesworth co-coordinated a Truck Art Workshop which was held in Berlin. In Karachi he worked on a large tented structure fronted by a brightly lit ‘Shadi Gate’ constructed on the grass lawns of Frere Hall. It was the Arz-e-Maood project, the ‘Promised Land’ installation that invited visitors to jot down their dreams and pin them on the tent.

The A.N. Gallery was launched in ‘97, with an exhibition titled High, Low & In-Between, a display that showcased the works of contemporary young artists along with artists engaged in popular art of the city in an effort to redefine the concept of ‘the Other’. Housed in a popular restaurant located at the Karachi Arts Council, the gallery made a lively impact before the restaurant closed down, and the gallery with it.

In ‘99 Heart Mahal was installed at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, to be joined by another collaborative project, the Aviation Fuel Tanker, and shortly after, Very Very Sweet Medina, made in collaboration with truck artists and cinema hoarding painters of Karachi, was installed at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.

David Alesworth says: “What I’d like to see in the art scene here is more voices and more dialogue in terms of other people’s viewpoints, a more loving inclusive attitude instead of an entrenched, insecure, endangered, activity.

“Whether we agree or not we can talk about all sorts of things. There are so few artists here that everyone is in danger of developing an entrenched viewpoint. Elsewhere, so many people are mining similar territories and there is no room to say ‘you’re stepping on my territory’, and it sorts itself out with more voices. Just the ambition to be an artist is an end in itself, because the world is not favourable to artists who are speculative thinkers.”

Although Alesworth accepts that he will never blend in with his surroundings, it’s not easy to slip back into the old identity. Gregory Minissale, whom I met in London recently, owned to having similar experiences on his return to England after being away for eight years.

“There is a problem handling money,” Alesworth says. “I walk down the street and people look at me as if asking, ‘where’s he from?’ Now with my parents gone, my sisters living in different towns, there’s no family home, and I doubt I’d return to Oxshot again.”