I wish to express my gratitude to the Indian Authorities who allowed me to start the TiBow Ornaments India enterprise in this marvellous Holy Valley of the river Beas and to attend to it without interruption in the last three years. I owe Special thanks to my Friend Partner Mr Mingmar Dorje Sherpa: He trusted me and granted me under his responsibility as an Indian Citizen, allowing the registration of the LLP and assuming the role of addressing its Administration. I am also grateful to Mr Tsering Rawat and his Family for the lovely assistance with so many questions, from providing the land for the workshop to helping me find a comfortable home and suggesting the uses and rituals dear to the hearts of this Shaminala Community. I am honoured by the friendly and cooperative hospitality these Valley People offer me and in first person to Mr Shiv Lal Sharma, who accepted me as a tenant in his building.
The TiBow Ornaments India project is born from the natural impulse to transmit technical and human experiences in Art to young minds and hands able to grant the continuity of the crafts over the single individual life. I aimed to reconstruct the atmosphere of the traditional Bottega of the Italian Craft Tradition. That means a laboratory dedicated to specific products and the transmission of the inherent research and know-how but also available for daily aid in the neighbourhood's life sociability.
Over the last decades in Italy, this natural relationship between the Craftsmen and the Population became almost illegal and impossible to practice. Cause of that and for other moral and political reasons, I could not, neither I wanted, to leave my skills, works and tools in the Country I was born in.*
I visited India as a tourist almost every year since 1993, becoming in-loved with Her Mountains. I have been growing more and more respect and admiration for this Republic, so true and vibrant notwithstanding Her complexity. Here I could live the daily presence of the Republican Spirit between the People and its Institutions. Moreover, I had been grateful to India far before visiting this Holy Country. Readings and teachings from the Indian way of life reached me when I was about twenty, influencing my human and spiritual development.
Therefore, when I decided to leave Italy, I wanted to bring all my heritage and possibly my ashes to India. India is geographically far, but She is much closer to my hopes and beliefs for life than the Nation where I have been living most of my life has been and is.
The process of Tibow had some phases before I could start producing:
Company setup
searching for its seat
building the workshop
setting up the multi-function machinery and tools
These four phases required more than two years, which may seem a very long time, but the situation in the Manali building boom is that it is not easy for a foreigner to find continued and fast cooperation with that kind of work. Add that we entered the situation of the Pandemic emergency restrictions after a few months: and the timings will be more comprehensible.
I could therefore start my artistic creations for the interiors and the body in Spring 2021.
In this Catalogue, I expose what I could finish as of June 2023. It is not a large number of works, as each presented many time-consuming challenges of the technology of materials and aesthetic choices. I better describe these questions in the dedicated sections of this TiBow Catalogue.
After two years of workshop activity, I can witness the immediate social relation growth with the neighbourhood. I am collecting Friendships and company from many of the younger in this Community: this fact is particularly dear to my heart. The help from these young men had been determinant in many of the encountered difficulties. Their disposition to communication and learning let me hope that I could have found the young minds to transmit the experience of Italian Art.
I had to suspend this main aim at the moment. That can be but the last phase of the TiBow Ornaments India Project. We are now at the moment of documenting and publishing our product.
Independently of how this result may go, success or rejection, I shall never regret the experience in this Valley and remain grateful to India for allowing me to realize some of my most satisfying works and live at least for some years between Her lovable People.
* - Some Readers may wonder why an old Italian artist came to build a workshop in the Kullu Valley. I have had several existential and political reasons to exile from my Country. Everybody interested in this personal side of the story can mail me or contact me on my FB Page or YT Channel about this argument.
The Beas Valley Sculptures
The first titanium ornaments for the body were conceived and realized when I was in Italy. I entirely imagined the standalone sculptures for interior decoration in India instead.
Since I have been visiting yearly as a tourist this wonderful Country, I dreamt about the forms I could have obtained from the outnumbered logs and roots abandoned along the roads and river beds or available in the firewood deposits.
It is wood in poor condition, in weird shapes, not indicated for regular carpentry work: cause of that, from an unconventional point of view, it is so rich in suggestions for the free-form imagination.
Once I could build my workshop here, I could follow those suggestions in a new (for me) approach to art creation.
I used to inspire my past Artworks by pure imagination or by imitation and embellishment of the natural exteriority. Cause of the condition of the supporting materials, I have to investigate natural bodies beyond the surface in the processes of decaying organic matter. I carve the logs in search of the sane wood remaining inside rotten timbers, roots and branches.
The aim is to bring them to a previously unthinkable new life. Once liberated by the rotten wood, the relics become the base block to sustain the quest for plastic volumes and harmonic NURBS surfaces, to offer the pleasure of continuity and smoothness in the final form. The results are usually in a feminine gender of beauty.
Everything is deeply feminine in this Valley, and with feminine characteristics, these sculptures of mine are born.
It is not a question of choice. Observing the rough external appearance of Nature, we can see many masculine shapes: if I carve the dead logs to their inner resisting soul I find plays of volumes and lines mostly in graceful feminine proportion and disposition instead.
Creating these objects has pushed my skills and patience to their limits. Many kinds of technical and psychological difficulties arose during the work. The condition of the material first, of course, but also the variability and inconstancy of weather and humidity seriously affected the use of some of the required accessory materials like glues and resins used for restoration and modelling.
Otherwise, I have had the great satisfaction of employing in these works together almost all the artistic techniques I applied to learn throughout my life: both in matters of creation and restoration.
I wish to express my gratitude to the Gods and Goddesses of this Valley for guesting me and offering me the strength and Grace to challenge and dominate my limits in this new creative adventure.
Semi-wearable Sculptures
In order of time, titanium is the last material I came to work on in my artistic activity. I was still living in Venezia, Italy: this contact happened during cooperation as a 3d designer of ornaments realized via CNC.
In my formation, Art is a search for beauty as for originality and unicity; soon, the proper* way we were adopting to work that metal/not-metal suggested to me a possible challenge.
CNC production can somehow pursue the first aim, beauty; in no way the machining may supply the second requisites of originality and unicity. Every object materially realized has already been visible as a virtual 3d model or wax if destined to be cast; moreover, it will be reproducible in an n number of identical items.
Could I introduce a way to form titanium in non-reproducible shapes? Could I push its molecules along the lines and volumes of my aesthetic sense without the media and limits of the cloud of points, meshes and relative soft-hardware? Could I do that with just my hands and the traditional tools of goldsmithing? Behind difficulties harder than gold or silver, titanium offers broader freedom of expression than those metals I had employed in my previous jewellery creations. More about TiBow titanium colourising ...
Titanium offers the advantages of its lightweight and its capability to remain elastic and non-deformable even when reduced to the size of a half mm thread. These qualities allow the creation of forms which, while decorating the skin as every jewel does, may also extend to vibrate in the space around the body as standalone sculptures.**
The elasticity and strength of the metal invited me to invent new tensile structured settings for the replaceable stones, unimaginable in gold and silver technology.
To be seen and enjoyed the most is another aim of artwork. These ornaments for the body are not of the kind for everyday wearing. Special occasions and mundane Premieres are their scopes, but I did not want them to spend most of the time in a drawer or a safe.
So they are born as wearable parts of sculptures, ornaments for the house, able to be in permanent exposition and fruition. These supporting sculptures are all projected and realized in TiBow Shaminala workshop, with local recycled wood and stones and the aesthetic influence of this Holy, feminine Valley.
* I define titanium machining as proper because this material presents exceptional physical and mechanical characteristics of resilience, cohesion, solidity and lightness. In the industrial scope, the aid of strength amplifiers is therefore necessary.** The heaviest necklace in this catalogue weighs less than 50 grams. It would not be solid enough if made in gold, and its weight would be over 200 grams.
