Fulbright Artist Statement Vineet Kacker’swork draws from a personal involvement with Eastern spiritual thought, andthe landscape, art and iconography of the high Himalayan regions.Ancient texts, icons and imagery are remixed and re-contextualized into new works that are symbolic without being derivative, accessible without being populist. The work walks a line between the meditative and the playful, and questions the perceived boundaries between Spirit and Matter. Topographies of a Formless World is a rotating column, based on the prayer wheel. The rotation is an aid to shift focus from the thought-perceived linear to the eternal-cyclical. All religious teachings, all sacred iconographies are efforts to map a formless world. As human beings we choose to see ourselves on a horizontal plane, travelling through life from point A to point B. But to begin to perceive the unseen mappings of an underlying formless world, a shift in perspective is needed. Only with a new, elevated seeing is more of this undiscovered topography revealed. The Architecture of Dissolution is based on the form of a chorten or stupa. Chortens are reliquaries that may store actual mortal remains of enlighted spiritual masters, but they are also seen as repositories of timeless wisdom. While in the material world commemorative statues are built to laude the achievements of individuals, chortens are built for ones who have seemingly done the apposite – they celebrate a stateof dissolution of individual identity. Fulbright Experience In 2001 I had just finished building my ceramics studio when I was selected for a residency award at the vibrant Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, USA. At that early stage in my art practice I was hungry for international experience, yet without personal funds to support such ventures. The Fulbright grant made possible an exciting three-month residency that included working alongside peers, visiting and interacting with well-known local artists in their studios, and having an exhibition of my work at the NCC art gallery. In addition, the Fulbright supported me to travel and present a lecture on “Ceramics in India-From Tradition to Modernity” at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, University of Minnesota and the Clay Art Center in New York State.
