Earth Gods / Velar Sculpture, at the Museu do Oriente

article

DATE

03 Dec 2025

AUTHOR

Margarida Alves

Earth Gods / Velar Sculpture, at the Museu do Oriente

AUTHOR

Margarida Alves

At a time when the deterritorialisation of reality threatens to sever the fundamental ties between human beings and nature, a gap opens up that allows us to experience the earthy and ancestral meaning of ceramics. In Earth Gods / Velar Sculpture, we focus on ways in which it is still possible to share gestures, from southern India (Tamil Nadu) to Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal.

The exhibition, curated by João Rolaça, does not focus on a purely symbolic and object-based logic, but rather on a curation of processes. The project is a continuation of his PhD thesis, A Forma do Fogo: escultura cerâmica de larga escala e seus processos de cozedura (The Shape of Fire: large-scale ceramic sculpture and its firing processes), a research project that embraces experimentation as a form of thought. In this sense, firing is a fundamental sculptural process. However, how are these kilns conceived? And how are these structures given shape? Instead of using large-scale industrial technologies, Rolaça focused, in particular, on the recovery of practices that have been little documented from Ancient Greece to the present day. This gesture is not limited to the historical and documentary dimension, but above all constitutes a theoretical-practical proposal for sharing by a sculptor-ceramist. In 2019, this concept led him to meet the Velar, a community of artisans from Tamil Nadu who, generation after generation, erect monumental terracotta sculptures for ritual contexts.

As a result of the friendship that had developed, in 2025 three Velar masters, Palanisamy Tharmalingam, Meyyar Rengasamy and Karthik Meyyar, were invited to take part in an artistic residency at the Oficinas do Convento in Montemor-o-Novo. There, using their own ancestral techniques, they gave shape to large-scale mythological figures and other sacred figures, recreating on Portuguese soil the spiritual commitment that characterises their craft. The material conditions of the territory, namely the distinct plasticity of the clay, the humidity and the lower temperature than usual in Tamil Nadu, introduced changes in the drying and firing rhythms of the clay. However, these contingencies also highlighted the resilience of ancient knowledge, capable of adapting to a new place.

The monumental sculptures were made in separate self-supporting sections - head, legs and body - with the upper parts designed using thin walls reinforced by beating a wooden paddle on the outer surface and a stone mallet on the inside. The rice, mixed and kneaded with the clay by the artisans with their feet, gave structural strength to the forms, allowing for an increase in scale and a lower density, as it dissipates during firing. In this sharing of techniques, visible at each stage of the work, the masters opened their knowledge to the observation and learning of others. The residency culminated in the construction of a large kiln, open to public participation, with a profoundly earthy and community-oriented character.

From the conception of the forms and their firing to the exhibition space at the Museu do Oriente, a transfiguration takes place. The sculptures erected by the Velar masters in Montemor-o-Novo are presented as if they inhabited the forest, evoking the open-air shrines where they are traditionally displayed in Tamil Nadu. In the museum, the immersive scale gives visitors the experience of crossing that liminal space between nature and the deities. The figures stand before us not as isolated objects, but as tutelary presences.

At the Kutirai Etuppu festival, dedicated to Ayyanar (guardian deity of villages and night protector who rides along the edges of fields accompanied by entities that assist him in the fight against evil spirits), artisans produce votive sculptures that will be offered at the open-air temple, such as Purna and Pushkala, Ayyanar's female companions, the warrior Karuppan, the mother goddess Amman, the elephant god Ganesha of knowledge and overcoming, Naga, the sacred serpent of fertility, the sacred ox Nandi, or even Ayyanar's guardian dogs. The moment of delivery of the votive figures is marked by a ritual of sacralisation. Once this function has been fulfilled, their destiny is not eternity, but return to the earth. The firing is deliberately light, so that the sun and rain can wear away the material until it disintegrates and returns to the earth. The sculptures follow one another over the years. In the temples, it is possible to see the older ones alongside the more recent ones, with varying degrees of degradation, in a continuous cycle of creation and dissolution.

The technical complexity from which the monumentality derives is not opposed to the fragility of the firing: on the contrary, it is its condition. Unlike the classical Western tradition, which often thinks of art as permanent, here the work is born destined to disappear. It is in this cosmogonic sense that the encounter with the Velar reconfigures the Western view that permeates the very notion of sculpture, restoring to it a telluric dimension in which the force of the gesture does not lie in the final object, but in the material cycle that sustains it.

Beyond the sacred temple, other presences complete the exhibition: the kolam, ephemeral drawings made with rice flour traced daily by women at the entrance to their homes, in a gesture of protection of the home and gift to nature, food for insects and birds; the Drishti Pombai, placed on roofs as guardians against the evil eye; various votive figures from the Oriente Foundation collection; anthropological contextualisations that articulate with techniques, thoughts, and sculptural processes. In parallel, a sculptural nucleus by the artist Liliana Velho, who undertook a residency at the Convent Workshops during the master's stay and presents us with a space of small-scale terracotta sculptures, artefacts that resonate with the ritual gesture of the Velar.

In Earth Gods / Velar Sculpture, the secret lies in sharing the processes, whether in Tamil Nadu, Montemor-o-Novo, or anywhere else where clay lends itself to transformation.

The exhibition can be visited at the Museu do Oriente until 4 January 2026.

BIOGRAPHY

Margarida Alves (Lisbon, 1983). Artist, PhD student in Fine Arts (FBAUL). Researcher by the University of Lisbon. Degree in Sculpture (FBAUL, 2012), Master in Art and Glass Science (FCTUNL & FBAUL, 2015), Degree in Civil Engineering (FCTUNL, 2005). She is a resident artist in the collective Atelier Concorde. Collaborates with national and foreign artists. Her work has an interdisciplinary character and focuses on themes associated with origin, otherness, and historical, scientific and philosophical constructions of reality.

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