Hetain Patel
Together with students from Haberdashers’ Borough Academy, Hetain Patel explores imitation as a form of empathy and listening and shares some of his journey to becoming an artist.
Hetain: So these are my niece and nephews. We’ve got Lola, Raphael and Elias. I mean they kind of own it, I'm just borrowing it from them.
My name is Hetain Patel, I'm an artist. I work in lots of different ways from sculptures to paintings, filmmaking, performance. It always starts with the idea and then it sort of finds its form afterwards.
I understand or develop a lot of works that I do through my own body.
[Speaking to students] What we're going to do today is a little bit of what I might do in a rehearsal studio. And you’re just going to start moving really slowly and the other person is going to follow and just mirror you exactly.
Whether I'm making performance work or sculpture or paintings they’re still through the body.
[Speaking to students] There’s an invisible string forcefield from head to hand.
The reason I love the imitating is because it makes you listen. It makes you really pay attention to what somebody else is doing.
[Speaking to students] We'll take that person for a walk.
To Dance Like Your Dad is a two-channel film. On one side there's my dad, on the other side is a film of me where I've learned all of his words and all of his movements. So the two films play side-by-side and I move in sync with him and talk in sync with him.
Student 1: When you turned the Ford Fiesta into like a Transformer why did you think of that? Was there a specific moment that you just thought you wanted to do that?
Hetain: It was kind of an excuse just to spend time with my dad making, talking, eating our sandwiches together, getting to know each other. He was teaching me how to weld and so it kind of came from there.
Imitation for me is like a deep exercise in empathy you know, it’s kind of really trying to listen to someone and watch someone.
Hetain: What's the trick to staying in sync with each other?
Student 2: If you're not concentrating well enough you might miss it.
Hetain: Paying attention, concentrate on the other person, yeah.
The opportunity is to listen, to look, to be interested in the person you want to work with and to sort of try to see the world from their perspective.
Hetain: Nice details, I like this sliding back, it feels really casual.
Student 3: They have a lot of sitting down.
Hetain: What's it like as an audience then?
Student 4: Even though there's no words you can kind of like figure out what's happening in the scene just through their body movement.
Hetain: Because you recognise it, you mean?
Student 4: Yup
Student 5: It’s interesting to see other people's creativity in what they can like show from movement.
Student 6: Sometimes people do it like absolutely perfectly. They might be like really interesting for the person who’s watching.
Hetain: It’s kind of like watching a skill.
Student 6: Yeah.
Hetain: I think a lot about where I'm from, how it shapes me. It could mean the way that my family, my elders, my ancestors have lived.
The patterns behind me are a graphic version of my grandmother's carpet. It was the carpet that was in our family home for decades since my family emigrated to the UK from India. This carpet, everything's happened on you know, the good, bad and the ugly and so they’ve taken residence in my practice now as a way to kind of keep a connection to that place and to try to unpick it a bit. You'll find this pattern on drapery like this in my paintings on clothing that I've made. I've started tufting carpets now. I've wrapped a car in it before.
If I'm thinking about my own personal biography I grew up, there was a lot of racism there's a lot of prejudice and so you know my desire for the world is people don't go through the things that I went through and how could I make this better?
Art can be a really brilliant vehicle to connect with somebody or exchange with somebody outside of conversation or words whether it's physically, visually, there's so much that transpires between people.
Art-making to me feels like one of the richest feelings of life in all its searching, in all its validation in all its messiness, in all its in all its guts and glory. I think it’s one of the closest I can get to honest, raw expression. We've all got that inside us and we've all got this innate creativity and desire to express yourself, to be heard, to be taken seriously.
I think my advice would be if you’re becoming an artist is to keep your mind as wide as possible, as open as possible. All those thoughts that kind of feel like they veer off from the path, they’re the good ones, and try and trust in those try and trust in your feelings.
About Hetain Patel
Hetain Patel is an artist who works with performance, filmmaking, painting and sculpture. He says every artwork starts as an idea and then he chooses which medium to use afterwards. That means he might have an idea and it could end up being a sculpture, or a performance, or something else.
He's made several artworks with his dad, including a film called To Dance Like Your Dad in which he copies his father's movements as he explains his work in a factory. He also made a film called The Jump where he dressed up as Spiderman and got his whole family involved!
"The reason I love the imitating is because it makes you listen. It makes you really pay attention to what somebody else is doing."
Hetain Patel
Artwork
Don’t Look at the Finger
Hetain Patel
2017
Prompts
Hetain Patel makes art about people, family, and paying attention. In the video Hetain and the students notice that you can understand what is happening without words, just by watching how people move.
How can we understand someone without them speaking? What can you learn about them from the way they sit, move or use their hands?
With a partner, think about everyday movements such as sitting, yawning, fiddling with something, standing up or walking.
How could you put a sequence of these together to make a short performance?
In the video, Hetain talks about his family and how they inspire his art.
He made a performance with his dad by copying his movements and words.
What type of performance do you think you could make with a family member? Can you think of another kind of artwork you could make with your family? Could you create something that would let you spend quality time together, like Hetain did with his dad?
How to use
Watch this video with your class to introduce them to Hetain Patel, a practicing contemporary artist and inspire them to make art of their own.
Throughout the video, you can find many engaging ways for your students to think about people, family, and the way we communicate without words. By working with the prompts given, your class can explore new ideas about how movement, imitation, and everyday gestures can tell stories, and how family and personal experiences can inspire creativity.
Hetain Patel encourages empathy and understanding through paying close attention to the people and world around us; how can you encourage your class to do the same?
