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THE
ARTS: NIGHT BLOOM
Clay
Court
Mrinalini
Mukherjee's love for nature results in a bizarre mix of botany and anatomy
in her sculptures
By
Anshul
Avijit
Forget
that you've even noticed the title "Night Bloom". Sculptor Mrinalini
Mukherjee, 51, simply hates naming her works. It's only long after she's
through with her handiwork of creating her forms that she randomly succumbs
to the traditional exertion of attaching tags and tales. "I work
intimately with many ideas. It is only later that I get to analyse what
I have done," says Mukherjee. So definitely take a second look if
you think that her large, six-part ceramic series looks only like a doleful
mountain of crimping vegetation.
 So
here's a fresh new side of the story: "Night Bloom 4" resembles
... well ... an overgrown, disordered vaginal form multiplying through
some yucky blood-stained leaves. "Night Bloom 2" takes on a
distinctly anthropomorphic outline with its cross-legged lower-half and
those accessories on the head (or whatever) looking pretty much like molten
Buddha-ears. And in "Night Bloom 3", in more muted shades of
sun-free soot gray, emerges a terrifying torso with hacked limbs and slashed
breasts. So much for the deceptively Byronic title. And Mukherjee, at
last, is more telling: "It could be combination of the female form,
the plant form; of the female becoming a plant, the plant becoming a female
or the plant becoming a garment. It all depends on my personal feelings
at the time." One could also call the freshly-baked works in Night
Bloom, now showing at Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai, flora females.
But the
flora always came first; the females (and the ceramics) much later. Daughter
of artist parents, Mukherjee went to study art in Baroda after schooling
at Welham's, Dehradun, and did a lot of figurative painting before the
annual fair in the Gujarati town introduced her to jute ropes. That changed
her brush-and-canvas life forever. (But, as she says, she's sick and tired
of repeating this story to journalists; she's been doing it since 1972,
the year she completed her master's in fine art.)
In her early
works of hemp and sisal, the genre for which she is now famous, Mukherjee
created large landscapes like "Waterfall" and individual plant-packed
pieces like "Amaltash", "Sunflowers", "Date Palm",
"Cactus" and "Burgeoning". Which incidentally, just
like "Night Bloom", throw up a feast of meanings. There were
also forest clusters called "Vriksha-Nat" or "Arboreal
Enactment" in polychromatic ochre with swarthy trees dancing to some
silent forest tune. So what's the genesis of the fecundity fixation? "Maybe
it was because I was living in Dehradun or maybe it was because I had
a good nature study teacher," she says. "In fact, I was so attracted
to botany that I wanted to study it in university."
Later this
hemp herbage slowly began to transmute into more discernible phantoms
of public and private reverence ... complete with eyes, noses, feet and
phalluses. What appeared were knotted life-size forms like "Purush",
"Pakshi", "Prithvi", "Yakshi Van Raj", "Vanshri"
or "Nagini", three of which ("Rudra", "Pakshi"
and "Devi") were displayed at the Sydney Biennale in 1986, making
Mukherjee the first Indian artist ever to show at the prestigious art
event. The sexual quotes that also form a fundamental part of her imagery
were incidental; just the influence of Baroda-based gurus like Jairam
Patel ("because every art school depends on how much of the faculty
are working artists"). When people later began to point out what
seemed like the surfeit of genitalia in her work, the integration steadily
became more conscious. During a recent trip to Amsterdam, she pulled out
a pair of over-enlarged rubber breasts in a gift shop to fix like a bikini
over the knitted figures. She held herself back just in time.
But strangely
enough, despite her successful deployment of the fibrous medium, the male-dominated
world of Indian sculptors found it difficult to accept her as a full-fledged
sculptor. "They think that if you are not working with stone or bronze
you're not macho enough. It's not that I have a problem with those mediums;
it's just that I like my work to be additive, organic, something that
keeps growing."
Perhaps
that is one of the reasons why she took a natural turn towards ceramics,
her current preoccupation. In a workshop at the Sanskriti Kendra in 1995,
which also had three Dutch artists, Mukherjee began to experiment with
papier mache as a hasty alternative for a three-month deadline (good thing
she didn't try hemp-a single sculpture takes her close to a year). Papier
mache didn't really work-it was okay when wet but shrivelled up quite
splendourlessly when dry. Then a Dutch artist, Rob Birza, and his colleague,
Bastienne Kramer, introduced her to the "immediacy" of clay,
to which she instantly responded. Her multiple terracotta pieces put on
a stone bed at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, much smaller
than the ones she's doing now, looked like extra terrestrial flowerets
from a Star Trek episode. It was a blooming beginning.
The "Night
Bloom" pageant, and a variety of smaller sculptures displayed along
with it, were the result of another workshop, this time at the world's
finest ceramic haunt, the European Ceramics Work Centre at Hertogenbosch
in Holland, earlier this year. Mukherjee was lucky to find herself there-she'd
gone there a couple of years back and there's no way one can get invited
again so soon unless someone else dropped out in the middle. Her Dutch
artist friends informed her about a fortuitous vacancy and Mukherjee again
landed there with a three-month deadline and not much idea about what
she was going to do.
But it was
not so difficult, because as she says, she always treats her work as a
dynamic entity, "adding, alternating, modifying". One of the
inspirations for the present series also came from the concept of the
female Buddha (an extension of her continuing engagement with the Devi
forms) imbued from the Buddha images at the flora-fondled Borobudur shrine
in Indonesia. And, one must not forget her botany teacher from school
days.
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