Talat Dabir, like so many of Pakistan’s contemporary masters, was also, until very recently, a teacher at the National College of Arts in Lahore. She taught sculpture to generations of Pakistani artists. She taught my mother in the mid 1980s and she taught me in the mid 2000s. And what unified my experience of foundation-year sculpture with that of my mother - stretching two decades back - was a marrow-freezing, Gothic dread. This dread would set in the day before sculpture class and reach majestic proportions the morning we’d be walking towards the studio. Talat Dabir - a gentle, maternal presence outside the classroom - was an inflexible, taciturn, doom-inducing instructor who made students and their clay offerings wither with just a look.
In retrospect, I think I understand why our fearful, quavering attempts with clay frustrated her so. Every time she would descend upon one of us to demonstrate, with quiet irritation, the right way of sculpting with clay, she would make it look like the simplest, most beautiful thing on earth. The clay - cold, dead, and utterly pointless in our unpractised hands - would turn into a perfectly sensible material in hers, verifying millennia of its practicality as a medium for artistic and utilitarian creations. The key, it turns out, was to not turn it into a bugbear. And that is exactly what we did! We attributed all sorts of evil properties to it and decided, early on, that our collective inability to work with clay would ruin our lives.
The clay - cold, dead, and utterly pointless in our unpractised hands - would turn into a perfectly sensible material in hers
Now, a decade after I arrived at those premature conclusions about sculpture being the single greatest misfortune to have ever befallen me, I found myself at the Taseer Art Gallery in Lahore, viewing Talat Dabir’s new sculptures. Dabir has, over the years, established a set of characters and motifs as her own, such as the long-necked, long-limbed figures who appear sometimes grouped together and sometimes singly in her reliefs and sculptures. In some of her past work, these figures were placed among or atop clusters of clay facades, suggesting a tight, interstitial world of corridors and interiors. In the works displayed at the Taseer Art Gallery, however, Dabir’s ageless and sexless terracotta players are set loose in the wide world. They gather their long legs carefully into precociously tiny boats and bob along on curling waves that part here and there to reveal fleshy yellow fish. They emerge from sea shells like genies from lamps, thin and wavering, toting sashes of glazed terracotta fabric. They cradle cats, fish, and seahorses in their arms, sometimes morphing into them from neck up and waist down. Dabir’s sculptural prowess is evident in the treatment of these animal forms and in the actions and movements particular to each of them. She sculpts cats spilling out of arms, fish curling around torsos, birds sitting snugly in cupped palms. These works are titled ‘Confidant’ and the relevance is not lost on you for a second. They evoke the ‘familiars’ or animal spirits of a more wonderstruck and less sceptical time - small animals who would provide guidance and companionship to lost and lonely people, or become their alter egos.
Talat Dabir's sculptural prowess is evident in the treatment of these animal forms and in the actions and movements particular to each of them
It is, on the whole, a universe alight with the oldest and simplest kind of magic that Dabir conjures through her work. Her ascetic humans display a mute, deep kinship with the earth they inhabit. The exhibition is titled ‘The Submissive Self’, and fittingly, as these gaunt and ancient figures put you in mind of the anonymity and resulting universality of fairy tales. Philip Pullman, the award-winning English author who retells fifty of the Grimm tales in ‘Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version’, writes of ‘the conventional stock figures’ of fairy stories who have ‘little interior life’. They simply exist, and you have to take them as you find them on your way to an event or happening that becomes their story. “They seldom have names of their own,” observes Pullman. “More often than not they’re known by their occupation or their social position, or by a quirk of their dress: the miller, the princess, the captain, Bearskin, Little Red Riding Hood.”
Talat Dabir - Voyage 4 - White clay - 11 x 23 inches
Dabir’s clay people check off even fewer boxes. They are androgynous and their clothing is only ever implied. Their faces are inscrutable, as if smoothed over by passing time into the simplest of masks. In certain pieces from the show, they appear in multiples, relinquishing what little individuality they might display in other works to become a herd, a throwaway reference in the record of a bigger event. In ‘Voyage I’, for example, a squirming bouquet of these figures crowds a thick, little ark. The ark appears to be the subject, carrying the object – the crowd – and its combined fate to some unknown destination. The faces of this crowd, though frozen in varying degrees of distress, remain indistinguishable from one another. They become the very story of being lost at sea, or they become all the refugees who ever voyaged from one life to another. There is nothing to suggest the stirrings of a self within any of them. Yet that is the philosophy Dabir seems to have worked with. Of course, homogeneity doesn’t render her players powerless. I was put in mind of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Mushrooms’:
‘Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.’
