Jyoti Duwadi
Jyoti Duwadi is a multimedia artist who began sculpting wood in Southern California during the 1980s. Inspired by sacred abstract sculpture in his native Nepal and modernist pioneers like Isamu Noguchi, he reveals the beauty of salvaged wood by accentuating its unique shape and grain.
After excavating raw wood into an imaginary terrain of valleys and hills, Jyoti meticulously sands the surface by hand to invite human touch. This sensory experience is as important to the artist as the visual stimulation of discovering the life cycle of a particular tree: its rings of age, the limbs that sprouted from its truck, and the colors unique to the species.
Jyoti’s wide-ranging body of sculpture incorporates diverse materials such as beeswax, bamboo, palm fronds, and found objects. He has also created site-specific installations of carved redwood and bass wood sculptures at Joshua Tree National Park and Claremont Graduate School.
Most recently, the artist translated his concerns about climate change into 6 x 6 x 6 foot sculptures made from blocks of ice that referenced melting glaciers and icebergs. These installations were exhibited at the Whatcom Museum, Frederick Weisman Art Museum, El Paso Museum of Art, and McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
Art and environment also converge in Jyoti’s work with earth pigments gathered from sites around the world. They first appeared as calligraphic meditations drawn on Nepali paper and later painted on canvas. Since 2015, Jyoti has intriguingly introduced earth colors into an array of sculptures made by shaping recycled belt sanders.
What unites and ultimately defines Jyoti’s art is his openness to both chance and experimentation. His empathy for the natural world and the practice of Sadhana, a meditative approach to creativity, animates the work.