Pachpute is transforming the Rotunda and stairwell with wall drawings and paintings, banners, sculpture and animation. His images consider the history of coal mining that shaped the people and landscape of his home state of Maharashtra, India, and resonate with the mining heritage of Cornwall.
Across different media, distorted characters represent generations of Pachpute’s coal mining family. Sometimes shown as part human and machinery, they inhabit desolate or ruined landscapes that are often overlaid with symbols of protest and folklore. The walls of the space are washed with charcoal. For the artist, this dusty material refers to industrial wastelands created by the mass-extraction of coal and a ‘post-industrial smoke of failure that is floating in the sky’. Brought together as a single installation, these collective works tell stories of labour, willpower and suppression, exposing the human costs of commercialising natural resources and inequalities in who profits from the environment.
Prabhakar Pachpute born 1986, Maharashtra, India. Lives and works in Pune, India.
