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YATRA 2004 Black & White Indian Granite Yatra, Sanscrit for ‘pilgrimage’, reflects my practice of living and working at the sources of my inspiration. In 1985 I went to India having been invited by the British Council to represent Britain in the Indian Triennale. When travelling there I was delighted to discover the tiny village of Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu where a large school of temple sculpture was thriving. Here, for the past twenty years, I have worked amongst craftsmen using their ancient skills in the service of devotion, making, for my own part, contemporary sculpture appropriate to my own cultural background but responding also to the wholly different collection of references surrounding me all the time. From my house on the beach I observed the fisherman returning home in the face of the sun, admiring the simplicity of their catamarans, age-old craft made of beams of wood bound together. I was preoccupied for ten years as to how I might use these boats in sculpture. Another extraordinary local practice was the common use of split granite posts, marching across the land. I eventually found a way forward in the combination of these two elements. To preserve the beautiful catamarans for posterity I replicated them in the local black granite and placed them on a sea of posts where they soar above us. © Stephen Cox 2006
