{"id":89994,"date":"2025-02-02T11:29:27","date_gmt":"2025-02-02T18:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=89994"},"modified":"2025-03-17T14:58:01","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T21:58:01","slug":"the-evolving-vision-of-antra-sinha-comes-to-life-at-umoca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/the-evolving-vision-of-antra-sinha-comes-to-life-at-umoca\/","title":{"rendered":"The Evolving Vision of Antra Sinha Comes to Life at UMOCA"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A

Installation view of Antra Sinha’s “The Elements” at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City.<\/p><\/div>\n

One of the rarest and yet most compelling phases in an artist\u2019s career is the time when she emerges like the universe from the chaos of limitless possibilities and begins to find her best direction forward: the work that will fulfill her potential. Antra Sinha<\/a> has been working with clay for at least ten years, currently at Utah State University in Logan, but has only now begun to become well known to the arts community. First at Bountiful Davis Art Center (BDAC) in December, and now at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA), where she is the vanguard of a coming, major celebration of her medium, she has exhibited sculpture series, the extent and originality of which stand out as a challenge for us to begin to comprehend.<\/h4>\n

As Betty Edwards explains in her groundbreaking text, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain<\/em>, verbalizing the mental process of artmaking while creating it sets up a conflict in the divided brain. So it\u2019s not really surprising that in several videos of Sinha made while she wedges and sculpts clay, she struggles a little as she wrestles her thoughts into words. But there\u2019s more to it than that. In Anubhooti<\/i>, her collaboration with\u00a0 <\/span>musician Megan Simper at BDAC, she made no attempt to narrate the sacred material that underlay the sculptures or teach a spiritual lesson. It is true that her Hindu subject matter belongs to a sophisticated culture that resists being easily conveyed to those unfamiliar with its vast size and complexity, but while Sinha has drawn on it for ideas, she doesn\u2019t seem interested in explicating this background material, let alone proselytizing on its behalf.<\/h4>\n

What Sinha seems eager to share instead are several more readily accessible sources of inspiration: geometry and nature. The two are intimately interconnected, of course. Consider the beehive, the symbol that unifies Utah\u2019s spiritual and secular realms. Its essence lies in the hexagon, the shape that permits filling space with the tightest and strongest pattern, which is characteristic of nature from the hardest mineral, diamonds, through the limestone of the Wasatch Front to the carbon molecule central to organic chemistry and life itself. This shape appears in several forms in Sinha\u2019s clay, from the tetrahedral structures to what she calls the \u201cskeletal form.\u201d In this, she may summon to mind the hexagonal cracks that line the bed of bodies of water like the Great Salt Lake as they dry out\u2014whether seasonally or forever.<\/h4>\n
\"A

A collection of angular ceramic sculptures by Antra Sinha reference Fibonacci sequences and natural geometries.<\/p><\/div>\n

A principal geometric form that appears throughout her work yet may escape notice is the Fibonacci Sequence, which arises when the last two numbers in a line are added together to produce the next digit: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. In nature\u00a0 <\/span>this pattern gives rise to the spirals of sunflowers\u2019 seeds, the Golden Mean, and much more. In Sinha\u2019s art it becomes objects made by laminating successively larger (or smaller) copies of a given, two-dimensional shape to what has gone before. Sometimes the shapes are otherwise identical, while at others they gradually evolve. Mounted on the wall, potentially endless sequences of such shapes become waveforms, which transform themselves by similar processes of growth and transformation.<\/h4>\n

Of course, geometry is an essential component of clay, which is produced when water permeates minerals found in soil. Largely silicon and oxygen, the most plentiful elements in the Earth\u2019s crust, it forms geometric molecules that become hard and durable when fired. The centrality of these processes is reflected in Sinha\u2019s exhibition title: The Elements: Fire, Earth, and Water.<\/i> In a video, Sinha works raw clay as if for the pleasure of having it in her hands, and confirms it with a few words. \u201cAs I\u2019m working with it,\u201d she says with a grin, \u201cit it working on me.\u201d In fact, she suggestively confirms the impression that, even as she gives it unprecedented form, clay for her must always be itself. For such a universally adaptable medium, it\u2019s rare to find an artist who lets it speak with its own voice. Sinha seeks, and is finding, ways to do so.<\/h4>\n
\"A

Part of Sinha\u2019s exploration of box-like, radial forms, this piece conveys a dynamic sense of rotation despite its stillness, engaging with ideas of movement and stability.<\/p><\/div>\n

The objects at BDAC<\/a> were largely figural and suggestive of emotions or other human characteristics\u2014such as gender or spiritual qualities\u2014only a few of which revealed any interior space. Recently, Sinha says, she\u2019s been thinking about shelter, perhaps as an extension of her having had to find a home and a place at the table after her move to the United States. This may explain why the work at UMOCA features so many vessel forms, from the box-like, radial forms that seem to be rotating even as they stand still, to the vase or drum shapes that, while solid, create the visual illusion of being hollow. The tops of these are often covered with circular, concentric grooves that suggest the waves formed when a stone is dropped into water. And then there are the Fibonacci-derived, pyramidal shapes that seem to whisper of secrets that are both familiar and uncanny.<\/h4>\n

Any of these objects might be labeled \u201cabstract,\u201d but that wouldn\u2019t be quite right. Abstraction comes about when an essential quality is drawn out of something into which it might otherwise have disappeared. Sinha\u2019s are the essential shapes from which nature assembles, and the early proponents of Modernism in turn built, compound objects. They\u2019re not so much abstractions themselves as realistic representations of ideas that were originally abstracted from nature.<\/h4>\n

The intriguing opportunity now is to watch Sinha find out what else she can do with her several fundamental discoveries. When Picasso and Braque invented Cubism, they set themselves a challenge, one that artists are still exploring just over a century later. Until now, Sinha has apparently been content to explore her possibilities, engaging in conversation with her materials and many of her peers. But now she may feel some pressure to open up the discourse to those viewers who feel drawn by what they see at UMOCA. That\u2019s a great thing about art: somewhere it\u2019s always becoming new again.<\/h4>\n
\"A

A closer look at Sinha\u2019s round vessel sculptures, their surfaces adorned with concentric grooves that evoke rippling water. These forms, while solid, create the visual illusion of being hollow.<\/p><\/div>\n

Antra Sinha: The Elements: Fire, Earth, Water<\/em>, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art<\/a>, Salt Lake City, through Feb. 22.<\/span><\/p>\n

All images courtesy of the author.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the rarest and yet most compelling phases in an artist\u2019s career is the time when she emerges like the universe from the chaos of limitless possibilities and begins to find her best direction forward: the work that will fulfill her potential. Antra Sinha has been working […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":89996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[4634,809],"class_list":["post-89994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-antra-sinha","tag-umoca"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Drum-or-vessel-forms-scaled.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-31 22:58:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89994"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91353,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89994\/revisions\/91353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}