Our daily lives, living atmosphere and quality of life is not only signified by the physical buildings we inhabit but also speak about our tastes, culture and sophistication. Of our most serious endeavours in life is to create one such dwelling to exist and flourish in.

It is a silent army of people who painstakingly go about laying down bricks and concrete to create this, our urban footprint.

The sophisticated and design-minded buildings are visually so contrastingly different to the hard and weather-beaten appearances of the people who construct these structures for us. And yet there is such character in their form and faces.

There is a certain way we were meant to be that has been doctored and cultivated to present to the world, a packaging of us that most of us wouldn’t recognize if we were all taken back to a stage of mere existence.

It is these ideas that have taken root in my mind to create portraits of the construction worker in a series that would question our ideas of what ‘interesting’ is.

‘Constructing Life I’ is a series shot entirely on black & white 4.25” x 3.5” polaroid and an old school technique of polaroid transfer in colour.
‘Constructing Life II’ uses the same idea in black & white with a different technique of digital multiple layered images printed on canvas in sizes of 50” x 50”.

All works from both series will be editions of three.

Shibu Arakkal

Summer | Twenty Ten

Shibu ArakkalConstructing Life – Artist’s Note