Dhiraj Sharma gently places his latest creation on the centre table of his living room, a robot-like figure, clearly 90s-inspired, made from an interesting melange of objects. “I’ve named this character Pixie,” says the 40-year-old founder of 8mango, an organisation that transforms junk of all sorts into artefacts and keepsakes. I peer closer, trying to identify Pixie’s various components. His torso is a retro Pepsi can and his legs, composed of e-waste, disappear into trendy high-top sneakers made of discarded binoculars and wristwatches. On his back, Pixie carries an azure backpack, made of an ancient audiocassette while his stiff, LAN-cable arms stand away from his metallic torso, the ends pointing downwards. “He is made of 100% waste,” says Sharma, adding that it started with the can. “I had a Pepsi at the movie theatre, and could not throw the can away. It was too attractive to me,” he says. “Keeping that at the centre, I started building around it.”
It is Sharma’s ability to find inspiration in mundane, discarded objects that make his art so special. Broken jewellery, toys inveigled from his seven-year-old son, the innards of laptops and watches, waste paper, broken bicycle spokes and more are transformed into 3D portraits, small sculptures and quirky artefacts in his able hands. So where does he source his material from, I ask. Almost everywhere, really, he confesses. “I visit scrap yards every weekend,” he says, adding that his friends and family now are aware of his passion and often offer him their discarded items. “They even send pictures,” he says, with a laugh, recalling how his sister had called the previous day, offering a broken printer. And yes, he is also in touch with companies that want to upcycle their e-waste.
Sharma, who grew up in Pune, has been fiddling around with broken devices right from his high school days. “I was curious to see how things look inside, and what can be done, apart from using them in the conventional way,” he says. In 2006, a year or so after he graduated in computer science from Pune University, he launched his website 8mango.com, using the forum to display his artwork. The quirky name of the website came from an early artwork: a bust of Albert Einstein made from the seed of a mango he had eaten.
Dhiraj Sharma of 8mango
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Special Arrangement
He still remembers those early days, forging small artefacts over the weekend and at night, in the spare time he got after his day job at a Pune-based animation studio. “I would often keep the small artefacts I had worked on at my desk. People started showing interest and coming over to see them,” he recalls. In 2008, he got his first big break, when he was invited to showcase his work at IIT Bombay’s tech fest. “My first commissioned work was with them. I created a mascot using e-waste and domestic appliances, ” he says, recalling that three-foot tall structure, his very first large-scale project. “The appreciation I got from the crowd and faculty members was overwhelming,” says Sharma, who moved from Pune to Bengaluru in 2010.
Since the IIT showing, there have been many projects, both large and small scale. Some of these include an effigy of Pune’s Victory Theatre, a 10ft x 10ft representation of APJ Abdul Kalam made with discarded x-ray sheets, textured portraits of pop icons such as John Lennon and Frida Kahlo brought alive via scraps of old paper and plastic, and a delightful sculpture of a golden cat shaped out of bike parts and pet bottles.
Sharma is also associated with TEDx Hyderabad, serving as an experience partner with the initiative since 2017, and was part of a show on Sony Entertainment between 2008 and 2011, where he created art from waste, an experience he holds very dear. Currently, he works part-time as a creative advisor for a start-up, juggling both his career and art effortlessly. “When I want to take a break from my job, I do art. When I get exhausted by this, I go back to design,” he says, with a laugh.
I watch him turn back to a work-in-progress, a saxophone made of frayed gas burners and the tarnished base of a globe. He looks up from the artefact and remarks, “Upcycling helps raise the potential of something,” says Sharma. This, in turn, can play a significant role in the larger sustainability narrative, he believes. “In the last 15-odd-years, I alone have converted nearly 200 kg of waste,” he says, adding that he hopes his work will inspire and open more minds to the possibilities offered by upcycling. “The more people are aware of this, the more likely they are to upcycle.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
