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“[Thekaekara] added so much texture to the project because of his work with the elephant personalities—they’ve all got names, and the craftspeople who make the elephants know the characters of the elephants as well,” Ganesh says.
But why elephants? “The Great Elephant Migration” is a story of coexistence. Historically, elephants and humans in India have been able to live peacefully together, but urban development and habitat loss have resulted in shrinking elephant populations. So, the project places sculpted elephants into busy, human-populated quarters as a reminder that this land is ours to share. “It’s more of a storytelling way of looking at the world,” Ganesh says. “It’s not humans over here and animals over there, in some protected area.”
The first stop of the migration was Hyde Park in London during the pandemic. Prototyping the elephants, and then crafting enough to make 100, took years. (“It was always 100. It had to be completely and utterly unreasonable,” Ganesh cracks.) Unlike the rattan elephants you might happen upon in a cocktail bar in Palm Beach, the elephants in the exhibition rely on a more complex fabrication: Dried reeds from the noxious lantana shrub—which, per the project’s organizers, takes up more than 115,000 square miles of India’s protected forests and preserves—are bent, warped, and shaped into close approximations of an elephant’s real bone structure and musculature. “These have the boniness that people don’t naturally associate with elephants,” Ganesh says.
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