2026

In the beginning, there was Ice – Custodianship, Lineage and the Modern Automobile

There are three things to remember: creation needs no permission. The ingenious human mind is inherently free to conceive and create. Art opens out and throws light upon the seemingly mundane. 

This is exactly the case with Sankar Nadeson’s most recent artistic project. Its larger aim is clear: to uncover and meditate upon the forms, uses, attributes and psychosocial features of the ubiquitous automobile.

In his project titled “In the Beginning there was Ice – Custodianship, Lineage and the Modern Automobile” Nadeson traces an ancestry of form that threads its continuity from the biomorphic constraints of the past to the technocratic plenitude of the present. 

For Sankar Nadeson, it’s a long self-driven journey through the genealogy of a specific shape that is fuelled by eclectic thought. What results is a semi-shamanistic Postmodernist panoply of evolving forms based upon his aesthetic associations of movement, carriage, and the deeper realities of the automobile.

Associate Prof. Ken Wach,

Former Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts,

The University of Melbourne.

2025

Sankar Nadeson’s creative thoughts come on like a storm. His thoughts are ruminative; his methods locate and pinpoint – antennae that tune in only to the strongest signals.

Nadeson’s mind does not attempt to mimic or reproduce images of the visible world; on the contrary, it is clutched by the ideational potential of things in the world. His mind is impelled by perception rather than being inspired by observation. 

For Nadeson, it’s always the mental over the manual; the idea over the image. In other words, it’s always a disclosure and always about something rather than of something. For him, the cohesive act of artmaking is born of an embryonic mental event. These summary observations underpin the fundamental predicate of Nadeson’s creative procedures.

Furthermore, Nadeson seeks not to simply express himself, but to add enriching layers of meaning to everyday things. That is, things that exist out there; those images, items and objects that signal themselves in the external world beyond the internal self. So often, for him, it’s a matter of extracting embedded meaning – of reading the signals and transmitting their associationist content.

One senses this in his Fenris Runägg (rune-egg), an ovoid glass form that seems to emerge from its base, as though born of the earth. Its smooth surfaces and bulging shape suggest the emergent growth of mushrooms, the budding swell of leaves and flowers, the shapes of Mandala paintings, the Yoni structures of Indian votive monuments and the seed-shaped decorative imagery of many ancient cultures, particularly those of Nordic origin. The cumulative effect of these varied associations tends to blend and re-stress the artwork’s thought-provoking sense of pulsing energy – as though an everlasting and timeless life-force has been re-energised and fused into an evocative contemporary form. 

Nadeson sees this energised form as being complemented and even literally “capped” by his work Fenris Helmut. The work is based upon a Bell Bullitt motorcycle helmet that acts as a modified stand-alone ready-made artwork or, alternatively, as an accompaniment to the Fenris Runägg. The forms of these two Fenris Series works are similar and complementary; yet the sensations that emanate from the helmet form are vastly different. This discordant quality, best seen when the helmet form is placed over the egg form, acts through a juxtaposition of opposites – of life forms clashing with an inanimate mass-produced utilitarian object. One translucent, the other opaque; one organic, the other mechanical; one allowing light, the other rejecting it; one suggestive of speed, the other embodying composed calmness. Seen apart, the two works have a distinct stand-alone visual impact; seen together, the visual jolt is bracing. One might conceive of them as being akin to opposite poles of a magnetic force – strong when apart; active when together. The origin of this type of compositional formatting has a hidden history – one that Nadeson has fortuitously intuited. The famous Swiss scholar Heinrich Wölfflin maintained that what he called “closed forms” and “open forms” (one of his five pictorial principles) present very different modes of seeing and denote very distinct visual functions. An open form, such as Nadeson’s glass work Fenris Runägg, suggests a “reaching out” and an outward, beaming optical effect – almost unbounded and spiritual in tone. A closed form, such as Nadeson’s Fenris Helmut, suggests an inwardly focussed, self-contained, protective and rule-based set of visual attributes – almost rigid and ceremonial in tone. This interpretive Wölfflinian reading helps to elucidate the underlying visual dynamics of Nedeson’s two Fenris Series artworks – his antenna seems to have located and pinpointed the associationist power of the span of two of the compositional opposites of artistic practice, as well as informed his skilful use of the visual grammar of form.

Nadeson’s use of a twinning approach to visual composition may be seen to similar effect in his Fenris Crest artwork. It arises from the earlier artworks and attempts to fuse their thoughts and attributes into a unified nob of condensed meaning that may function as an emblem – in a way that references the Koenigsegg automobile crest. The resultant artwork, strikingly Rorschach-like in its divided forms, features two images of mythical wolves guarding a shield, as though in a stand-off between attack and defence – Nadeson sees its split-field imagery as a “psychological map of instinct and discipline”.

All three artworks in Sankar Nadeson’s Fenris Series may be profitably seen as arising from a long-term artistic meditation upon force and restraint and the push and pull of life’s energies and demands. 

Associate Prof. Ken Wach

Former Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Art, The University of Melbourne.

2025

Neuro City Naga

An Architects Review

Sankar Nadeson’s 2025 mural is painted on a concrete wall set underneath an EastLink overpass and along a busy local bicycle and walking trail near Sherbrooke Park in Ringwood, Melbourne.

Locals experience the artwork at differing speeds of movement whether they are walking, riding or skating and the mural reads as a visual meditation - an intricate drifting between urban architecture, cosmology, and the natural flow systems that quietly govern both. At its centre is the Naga, positioned not as an ornamental motif but as a protector and guide, a serpentine intelligence embodying the fluid dynamics of Mullum Mullum Creek that runs nearby too. In this gesture, the work becomes a bridge: between the built environment and the waterways that predate it, between the city as we know it and the flow of water on which its growth and survival depend.

The Naga Kolam form is particularly compelling. It draws from ritual kolam traditions - geometries of protection, blessing and feminine knowledge - while also unfolding as a kind of speculative cartography. In Nadeson’s hands, the Kolam becomes both ancient and futuristic, suggesting hidden networks of energy, water, and myth beneath visual references to the contemporary city. The mural conjures a cosmology of movement and continuity, marrying the logics of city infrastructure with the presence of ancestral pathways that persist just below the visible surface.

Its responsiveness to site is equally sophisticated. Though grounded in the immediate context of Mullum Mullum Creek, the mural speaks across wider networks - roadways, bridges, tunnels - systems of transport and connection that mirror the Naga’s own sinuous, connective form. Here the Naga operates as both ancestral guardian and speculative infrastructure, tunnelling through cultural memory as deftly as it navigates the imaginative terrain of urban design. The result is an artwork that invites viewers to consider the coexistence of modern transport systems with enduring mythic narratives, and the possibility that both are needed to understand how a city truly functions.

The materiality reinforces this layered reading. Marble dust and acrylic combine to create a balance of solidity and ephemerality, while turmeric-like effects - evoking munjal in Tamil culture - recall the roadside shrines where turmeric is used as a colour of healing and protection. Silver and gold gilding bring a surface shimmer, referencing water, refracted light, and the sacred ornamentation found on Indian sweets and festive offerings. This interplay of materials creates a sensory and symbolic richness that deepens the mural’s resonance.

Nadeson’s work ultimately operates as a spatial, cultural, and ecological diagram—one that threads myth into infrastructure and infrastructure into myth. It is a rare mural that not only beautifies a site but reinterprets it, revealing the deeper flows that shape both the landscape and the city built upon it.

Nick Travers, Techné Architecture and Interior Design

2021

Let’s expand upon the idea of a vehicle. 

The privately owned car is not merely a mechanical means of personal transport. Certainly, a vehicle carries a load, yet it also conveys a message. In this special sense both the car and its owner may be considered as being partnered in the creation and communication of individual identity. 

There are eco cars and ego cars, each driven by the dynamic urges and desires of selfhood. Ride, drive; take the air; catch the breeze – remember one thing: no-one has lived this moment before. The desire to be, the need to feel – these are our fuels. 

For our purposes, it is instructive to imagine the car as a pre-packed parcel whose contents and qualities reach far beyond its useful convenience as a means of direct transport. In this introspective mode of thinking the private car may be instructively viewed as a public presentation of self – thus considered, it functions not so much as a personal “expression” but more as a psychosocial marker. Many contemporary theorists and researchers have found such observations fascinating and much is written about their enticing connections. 

Such sealed bubbles of self – such vehicles of content – are also of considerable interest to visual artists. For them, vehicles also carry and convey - although they use these two words in very different senses. Artists, with their inherent visual literacy, are often drawn to the image-based challenges posed by cars’ sensuous shapes and surfaces. As well, artists seem to recognize and respond to cars’ value-laden contents and through their interventions they attempt to imbue those contents with value-added elements. When successful, the highest level of achievement is reached when one witnesses the development of non-decorative artistic enhancements that accelerate attention; that highlight head- turning uniqueness, and that transform cars into museum-pieces, exclusive assets, or highly prized collectables. 

In the final analysis, contemporary artists tend to work in ways that add types of “optical pop”, “visual weight”, billboard spread, splash screen, “grit-screen” or “image-stitching” effects to vehicles in ways that mask their normal functions through the use of layered figure-ground compositions. Broadly, visual artists aim to enhance the highly refined form of cars by the balanced placement of contrapuntal images and the use of appropriate colours and application techniques. Their overall purpose is to transform a mechanical marvel into an aesthetic wonder – to “hatch” it into a new life. 

This type of transformative strategy lies at the core of all Art Cars. After all, the aesthetic (promoting perception through the senses) is always preferable to the anaesthetic. Essentially, it is a matter of extending sensory refinement – for example, a meal on a paper plate might well be wonderful, but the same meal on a hand-painted English Bone China plate induces a richer sensory response. It’s the heightened experience that is the driver. 

In many allusive ways artists are magicians in that they can transmute the ordinary into the extraordinary and snap the mundane into the marvellous – the artistic finger of the human imagination moves to enliven all. With this observation in mind, the early pioneering efforts of artists such as the French painter Sonia Delaunay in 1925 and the “democratic visuality” of her late-Art Deco times (where almost everything was worthy of artistic intervention) now seem particularly far-sighted. Following her ground-breaking lead artists thereafter often turned their hand to painting on the surface of vehicles. Value-adding artistic intervention was born and subsequently contemporary artists such as Alexander Calder, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Sandro Chia, Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons among others, contributed their specific creative inputs to this new genre of global artistic practice. 

The internationally-active Melbourne-based artist Sankar Nadeson joins these ranks and has developed an artistic schema that is well-suited to the historical background and aesthetic qualities of the latest Koenigsegg automobiles. He favours using the densely symbolic iconography of ancient Norse mythology in analogical ways that add emblematic meanings to complement the cars’ exterior forms. In addition, he has also completed extensive investigations with the celebrated artist Jon Cattapan (Emeritus Professor at the Victorian College of The Arts and past winner of the prestigious Bulgari Award) that aim to create an evocatively artistic “skin” that will clothe a Koenigsegg Jesko in ways that add a gossamer-like “constellation” of layered associations. 

Artistic creativity adds swoon to a car. It activates desire; it moves us with style and is suffused with sophistication. The take-home truth is that it is a happy union – think of it in this way: creativity marries human flair to engineering passion. 

Associate Prof. Ken Wach
Former Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts The University of Melbourne