Carving 3-D images away with Surja Bajracharya

KATHMANDU, Oct 15: Some ten minutes’ walk into the twisted gallis of Sundhara in Patan is an open courtyard of the Bhinsi Bahal, the place where Surja Bajracharya grew up with her three elder sisters. Now 40, she still lives there with her father, while all her sisters have married and moved out.[break]



As a child, Surja was deprived of education as she had to make a living to support her family. Following in her father’s footsteps, she began to carve away on the stones that lay around the house, and thus became the first female stone sculptor of Nepal.



“My father used to make stone sculptures for temples and monasteries,” says Surja, as she walks past her father who sits on the porch. “Now he is old and is not as able as before,” she continues, “I learnt everything from him.”



Surja lives in a typical old Newar home with mud interiors. Her works in progress, slabs of stone, and carving tools lay spread out at the entrance on the ground floor, which also serves as her little studio.



Till date, Surja has made nearly 3,000 sculptures. “Most of my sculptures are made on order, and they are mostly idols of Hindu gods and goddesses, or of Lord Buddha,” she says.



The next time you visit Nag Pokhari in Kathmandu, you will notice the statues of Hindu deities Saraswati, Kali, Ganesh, and Bhagwati because they were all hand-carved by Surja. “I also made the sculptures for the Bhinsi Bahal Temple,” she puts in, pointing out at the temple from her bedroom window.



“Like wood, each slab of stone has a specific grain or nerves. It is best to work along the direction of the nerves, not against them, or you can easily crack the stone,” explains Surja. The stones that she uses for her works come from Pharping, and are of two types. Hard limestone is dark gray in color and much harder to work with, while soft limestone has a beige tint and yields more easily.



“I start out by carving out the outline of the figure, whether it is sitting or standing, and work around it first,” explicates Surja and continues, “I divide the figure into seven parts to establish the proportions.” The human body can approximately be divided into seven parts, using the size of the head as the standard unit.



“For a small sculpture, I only need around 50 to 60 tools,” she says calmly, picking one tool after another, as she demonstrates how she works. Surja has a huge collection of tools and instruments from flat head chisels to pointed ones. Her other primary working tools include a hammer, a T-square or a right angle, a compass and sandpaper.



“Because I have to keep turning the stone around as I work, the face is carved at the end, or else the nose is liable to break,” she laughs. Depending on where the sculptures will be placed, they are either freestanding, or in the form of a relief. That is, if the figure should be raised from the stone, for instance, or when the sculpture is mounted onto a wall, in which case the other side needs to be flat.



With years of experience, Surja no longer needs the reference of photographs and replicas for her sculptures unless it is too complicated.



“I never went to an art school, but I took some training classes on sculpture and painting at the Akchheshwor Mahabihar of Pulchowk and have completed an iconography class on various mudras (hand gestures) of deities,” she informs. Her works sell anywhere from Rs 500 to Rs 150,000, depending on their sizes, and are mostly exported to Germany, America and Taiwan.



In 1996, Surja went to Bremen in Germany with fellow artists Rabindra Puri, Indra Kaji Shilpakar, and Radhe Shyam Shilpakar where she created a five-foot stone stupa. She also made the four and a half feet tall sculpture at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kathmandu that consists of nearly 30 individual hand-carved pieces, which were transported and installed at the site.



Surja was conferred with the Prabal Gorkha Dakshin Bahu decoration in 1998 by the late king Birendra Shah for being the first female stone sculptor of Nepal.



When asked about her opinions on modern sculptures, she remorsefully says, “There are so many new technologies in the world which have opened a lot of possibilities that sometimes I feel my work is useless and inferior.” She flips through a magazine on sculptures and points out a couple of complicated decorative designs. “I haven’t really attempted many non-religious sculptures.”



It is true that technology has assisted in making intricate and complicated sculptures, but the talents that Surja has is incomparable to those works because of the fact that it is all done by her own hands. In the end, she modestly accedes, “Yes, it’s true. I can’t create works like them, but then they also can’t work like me.”

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