Shahid Sajjad

By NuktaArt Team

On our arrival at Shahid Sajjad’s place we met him outside his studio on the ground floor of the single-story house where he has lived for several decades. He showed us around the studio, a long cavernous space where one encounters his work in different stages of completion. Crated works back from a show in Lahore are stacked against a wall. Pass the clutter of work tools and tables deep inside the studio is located the artist’s pride and joy, a modest furnace where he casts most of his bronze pieces.

On entering his living space on the first floor, we were greeted by several life-size wooden figures that stand guard  like silent sentinels. This includes the funerary works from Kalash obtained by the artist during a visit to Chitral and his own carved figures since the 1960s.

During the long interview with Shahid Shahid we covered many aspects of his art and life including his feelings on recently becoming a grandfather.

An artist who draws his strength from his experience and spiritual wisdom finds resonance in the writings of Bulleh Shah and Krishnamurti emphasizing that the true spirit of his work can be easily conveyed by the Hindu philosopher’s words: “Knowledge is essential for technique, not life”.

His mantra ‘doubt everything, investigate and question to find your own answers’ has been a driving force
which has helped this self-taught artist to understand his work, his materials, shaped his world view, and brought clarity about life.
   
What connection do you find between yourself and the Chakma people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts where you had spent a considerable time and dedicated the 1994 show titled ‘ My Primitives’ to  them.

Shahid Sajjad: I am that primitive! The sense of purity and clarity of the tribal craftsmen took me in instantly. I strongly feel that our claim to be civilized is a farce as we remain insensitive to our natural surroundings and towards each other as human beings. Predatory, selfish and wasteful, the irony is that we are known as the ‘developed’ ones while on the other hand ‘they’ who live in complete harmony with their own environment and needs are the  so-called ‘primitives’.

Some of your largest and most memorable work is in wood. What is it that inspires you to work in classical materials like wood and bronze while many of your peers in the sixties and seventies were experimenting with other materials?

Shahid Sajjad: It has everything to do with resources and my own relationship with the material. Wood requires fewer tools to work with. I always admired the works of Rodin, Gauguin and Henry Moore and somehow the materials, the tools, the scale…everything came together when I started working in wood.

You have made use of the lost wax method casting technique, which has a long history in our region. Tell us something about it, and also about your Japanese mentor?

Shahid Sajjad: It started when I saw a small picture, in an Italian magazine, of a sculptor chiseling away at his piece, using this technique and I wanted to explore it. The lost wax method casting or investment casting comes about with plaster, latex, wax and ultimately metal. It is one of the most difficult technologies to be undertaken for sculpting.

During my visit to Japan In 1973 I discovered that there was a sculptor, Akio Kato, in a village some 450 miles from Tokyo who was working in this technique. He was persuaded to see me for a short time so I remember taking the train right away from Tokyo to make it in time .My short meeting was very informative and later and through trail and error I taught myself the technique .We have kept in touch over the years and he tells me, “Now you are my teacher.”

In this technique you can create the original piece with soft materials such as wax or clay. Then make a mold with plaster or fiberglass. However, to preserve the details, an inner mold of rubber or latex is made as well. Molten wax is then poured into this mold and a coating covers its inner surface. Then the original wax is removed, hence the ‘lost wax’ process. The melted wax can be recovered and re-used, often it is simply burned up. Now all that remains of the original artwork is the negative space, formerly occupied by the wax, inside the hardened shell. Bronze is melted and poured into the shell. Let me just say that it is a lengthy and difficult process. One can labor over each cast, melt the bronze, pour the boiling liquid, and then also see the whole thing shatter!

Sculpture has not been a very popular field with artists so what made you take up sculpting as a career and what were the early years like?

Shahid Sajjad: I gave up a career in advertising to ride a motorcycle and travel around the world. On my return, I held my first exhibition. I gave up a comfortable, well paying job and exchanged it for freedom.  I could not live with a farce as I was suffering. As I began to paint and later to sculpt, marriage followed.

Salmana, my wife agreed to marry me and came to live here where there was nothing. Not even a chair. The years have just gone by… our two boys were born and raised in this house. She never complained and has had few needs. She used to do some sculpture too and you can see some of her pieces in this room, but then she gave up, saying one of us doing this stuff is more than enough!

I have been lucky to have this place in the centre of the city; it is convenient too to be working from the same place. My sculpture…the pieces I make… are not acts of will. They just happen. Intellectual issues do not figure predominantly in my scheme of things. I just look intently at what I do.

Your Bronze mural at Nowshera is an iconic piece, how did this ambitious piece come about?

Shahid Sajjad: It was a very ambitious experiment which took me several years just to understand the technical process of casting a 13 ½ by 6 ft mural which weighs over a ton. After several costly experiments it was finally made in interlocking sections and today stands in the Armed Corps Division Head Quarters in Nowshera.

Your scale over the years has got bigger and bigger and Horizontal Interference is well over 12 feet tall. Can you share with us how that came about?

Shahid Sajjad: Horizontal Interference came to me when I brought these very long logs from Mansehra. I wanted to convey with it how with knowledge comes a disadvantage for it does not let us explore on our own. In my work the problem – knowledge - is the dead body placed horizontally, interfering with living moments.
      
Can you tell us about how you approach your work?

Shahid Sajjad: Once you start responding to the physical state of things then all kinds of things start to open up. My materials may not be living things but they have a memory and they respond. They will respond differently in a different set of hands. I don’t deny that much of it is mechanical but perhaps something else happens too. When I say that it is not an act of will, that is only where the mechanical part of my work is concerned, but there is total chaos as far as the psychological is concerned.

Let me tell you something about the large piece called ‘Recycled Man’…I was living in this lumber factory in Mansehra. This was the only piece that I had planned as such because the machine had to take over. When the logs were being sliced horizontally by a mechanical saw, the ‘eye’ part of the piece caught my imagination and I thought that the direction of the oval of the eye can be changed and all the slabs could follow the same direction. The piece refers to the chaos in human relationships within the family, the neighborhood, the nation and different cultures without providing any answers as such.

Our minds are conditioned. We are also quite mechanical in our thinking. Creative notions do not come close to it when the mind functions like that.

After this very important (retrospective) show in Lahore, what kind of pieces are you planning now?   

Shahid Sajjad: I do not ‘plan’, it happens. I believe in life just taking its own course…the work just takes shape. One must not plan, but live in the present moment.