“And God not only allows us, but He needs to be used, being used is a way of being understood.”

– Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown, artist and sculptor Benitha Perciyal has not used the solitude to work. Her two pet lovebirds, who roam around her home in Chennai, have been molting all summer, and she spends hours every day collecting the feathers, watching them decay or get carried away by the ants in the garden. During our phone interview, she laughs as she tells me about this ritual – “when I do this,” she explains, “I’m realizing the moment. I’m noticing and acting spontaneously.” 

Collecting, noticing, witnessing – these are skills that form the basis of Perciyal’s unique artistic life. A Tamil Christian raised in Thiruvanamalai, the historic home of the Annaimalayar temple in north Tamil Nadu, Perciyal developed a relationship with words and scripture through the sermons she attended in her childhood and her own readings of the Bible. Confronted in these sermons with words that had been passed down for generations, she felt that she had to “surrender, become nothing … only then did [the words] reveal different layers,” she says. “I realized that nothing is unworthy, everything has value.” Her 2016 piece titled I exist, presents five books carved from used wood on a restored Burma teak shelf. Books appear everywhere in her work: sometimes by themselves, sometimes accompanied by a human bust – in I exist, the simplest of them all, Perciyal’s recognition of the inherent value of all things is an understanding of the objectivity of existence that precedes and outlives the individual, represented through the book.

Later, when she began to develop her artistic language, she experienced the same surrender in working with organic matter. These materials had their own desires and susceptibilities, they reacted to air and time, and she soon realized that working with them meant setting aside the desire to control and allowing them to change. In fact, witnessing decay and mutation became the grounding principle of her process – which also meant that understanding a substance was a process that sometimes took years. Perciyal’s choice of materials is not random: they are all either the same ones found in the faith, rituals she grew up with in Thiruvanamalai (frankincense and myrrh, incense, tree resin, jaggery), or materials that she felt had some quality of her own internal feelings, such as the cotton seed. Perciyal remains adamant in her commitment to using organic materials without eclipsing their identity as autonomous substances. This is the particular way in which her work articulates faith: as the process of preserving impersonal objectivity alongside the personal desire to manipulate and sculpt material as a medium for feeling. In other words, faith is not a fixed destination: it is a dynamic relationship between the universal and the particular, and requires our presence and participation. In her series I respect you because I want you to be manipulated by me (2018), the forms appear to be curiously “natural” or unaltered and at the same time marked with the strangeness of human invention. Speaking on this series, which presents both pieces made from organic material and assemblages of various found objects, Perciyal says, “all materials have resistance, and I wanted to weave them without changing their properties … it’s like detaching a part of the body.” Respect: allowing a body its own inherent attributes. Manipulation: testing how far those attributes can extend, if they can create a new expression without compromising the integrity of the original body. Perciyal’s effort to balance the two expresses the desire that lies at the core of faith: the striving for co-creation. 

In the contemporary arts milieu in India, Perciyal’s work sometimes attracts criticism or uneasiness because of its religiosity – one such instance was the 2014 Kochi Biennale, where she was discouraged from displaying a sculpture of Christ. She did it anyway, and she is mostly undisturbed by criticism, insisting that the source of her work is the accumulation of her lived experience, the things that have settled in her “like sediment” as she says – that faith is an inextricable part of her body. Faith and place are tied together in her memory: Thiruvanamalai for her existed in an atmosphere of palpable religiosity and “excess energy,” the destination of countless pilgrimages. Even before her ancestors converted to Christianity three generations ago, they were temple architects, a fact that she recently discovered and that filled her with curiosity and joy. The work of finding a container and expression for faith is something she has inherited, and provides the intention for her own practice.

Looking at her work now feels like remembering a source of endurance – not faith itself, but the practice of faith, the continual struggle to inhabit it, especially in times when external turbulence and precarity are constant threats. A survey of her body of work shows that the goal is not to arrive at a precise point of balance between objectivity and personal feeling where one can stay – rather it reflects how at various points in time they might weigh on each other differently, as a result of changing circumstances. Her Diary Entries series, which she exhibited in 2016 after an extended visit to northern Sri Lanka during the war, is concerned in part with what belief becomes, in the face of extreme violence and trauma. The series features some abstract pieces alongside scenes populated with terracotta dolls of women and children that she collected – “I would only collect the ones that were discarded because they were broken in some way,” she said. “Recovering from something like this means that you can’t leave anything or anyone behind” – a practice of salvaging in the face of widespread destruction that is still ongoing. As we discussed Diary Entries on the phone, Perciyal mentioned her 2012 piece I built as a toy and I prayed which suggests what comes from the struggle to recover – the installation is a kind of shrine, an almost-closed hanging circle of the fragrant sandalwood bead malas traditionally made in Thanjavur. “They used to be given as tokens of victory in war, among other things,” Perciyal explains. “I wanted to create a shrine where the body would be uncomfortable, where it could only stand-alone … if there was someone in there with you, you would have to hold on to each other and not let go.” She realized that procuring a real sandalwood mala was difficult, and what was available was in fact painted plaster made fragrant with chemical scent – “like a toy.” But this only made her more eager to work with it, because she understood that often belief is a kind of artifice – not deceptive, but simply a result of playing with what is available and making something of it. It can be isolating but at the same time something that binds a community together if nothing else can. 

In uncertain times, Perciyal’s work is a testament to the eternal play between power and vulnerability. It renounces immortality, choosing instead to linger in the space where the self faces the impersonal forces it is subject to, at times surrendering and at times emerging to speak back. One of her many self-portraits displays a cast of only her head, made of frankincense dough, lying sideways in the open window of a wooden case. The severed head bears a neutral expression, and the title of the piece declares: Here I shall be both lost and found.