Page 387 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

384 ART AND CRAFTS

Her work entered a new phase as she returned to her homeland. According to S.M. Ali,
‘... facing the problem of casting in East Pakistan, she began experimenting in cement.
Since the medium has its own way of dictating the form and style of sculpture and to a
certain extent, its subject matter, the artist fought her way into a new field of experiment,
36
... She took to abstraction.’ Novera was thrown into a situation where she had to alter
the direction of her work to adapt to a special set of circumstances. Here she chose to
amalgamate a number of values and ideas that she had ingested during her years in
Europe in combination with the surging nationalism that had been whipped up in Bengal
in the wake of the drastic events of the Language Movement of 1952. It is obvious she
knew the values of primitive and oriental art and the way they had been used to help
European art break from its formal naturalism to enter modernism.
The other factor is her exposure to modern European sculpture. In the 1950s, Henry
Moore was a major figure in British art. Moore’s interest in Egyptian, Greek and ancient
American art is well recorded. Thus, when Novera returned to her homeland armed with
her academic knowledge she found herself up against a wall of technical and practical
difficulties. She set about surmounting these by beginning to experiment with local
material. Most of her works were done in cement and marble dust as well as some in
terracotta, plaster and wood. Having to change her working method and material
naturally resulted in the change of the forms of her work. It forced her to abandon her
earlier naturalism for simplicity. Most of Novera’s pieces were done directly in cement
on an armature of stiff iron rods. These lent her work an angular and linear quality as
her forms followed the framework of the armature (fig. 9.21). The most interesting part
about Novera’s work is her choice of subject. In the works executed from 1956 to 1960,
fig. 9.21 Title unknown, we see Novera introducing the form of the ageless type of terracotta figures traditional
photograph Amirul to India. A good example of this is still to be seen in the mural in the ground floor of the
Rajib, courtesy Central Library of the Dhaka University, the then newly built Central Public Library, an
Drishwakarma early example of modern architecture by Muzharul Islam. However, subsequent
alterations to the building and the insensitivity of the authorities to its
aesthetic quality has altered both the building and the view of the murals.
Her free standing sculptures also adopted the simplification of terracotta
figures done in the pinch process as may be seen in her family groups,
which once stood on the library grounds and are now preserved in the
Bangladesh National Museum. In her cement pieces, she has often used
pigments mixed into the cement to color the surface of the forms.
This phase of her work shows her rather romantic celebration of the
Bengali village life. It is borne out by the testimony of her peers that
during her stay in Dhaka she cut all ties with her family and lived and
worked alone. Apparently, on occasion she would leave ‘... the city life
behind to go out into the river to live her life with common village folk
.... At one time, these sudden disappearances become as frequent as her
visits to the mazars all over the countryside.’ 37
This rather quixotic practice seems to evince her sincerity in trying to
fathom what the Bengali peasant really was. She knew that to charge her