Craft traditions are often imagined as practices rooted in the past: carefully preserved techniques passed from one generation to the next. But Unbound Forms at The Hepworth Wakefield reveals a more dynamic story. Bringing together the work of five pioneering women artists from India and Bangladesh, the exhibition shows how materials such as textiles, metal, ceramic, wood and paint can be transformed into works that honour inherited skills while pushing them into new territory.
The artists in the exhibition lived through a period of enormous change. Four were alive when India gained independence in 1947, while Mrinalini Mukherjee was born just two years later, in 1949. Their work emerged from the newly formed nations of India and Bangladesh, where traditions of making, craft and cultural identity were being reasserted. Across the galleries, familiar processes including wood carving, metal casting, weaving and knotting, are reimagined as tools for experimentation and personal expression.
One of the themes that recurs throughout the exhibition is that of sculptures as deities. Ritu Raja, meaning “ruler of seasons”, by Mrinalini is made from two shades of natural hemp, folded to imply both male and female genitalia. The cylinder at the base of the sculpture recalls a lingam – a phallus representing the god Shiva in Hinduism. The male structure is enveloped or held by a series of folds, recalling female anatomy or botanical forms. In Nag Devta II, also by Mrinalini, the lingam surfaces as a snake deity.
Leela Mukherjee is the mother of Mrinalini. Her carved wooden sculptures, Bull and Buffalo, depict important cultural animals in South Asia with additional associations as the vehicles for Hindu gods.
Novera Ahmed’s sculptures also imply the presence of divinities. Her works Shurjo (sun) and Chand (moon) are abstracted personifications of celestial forms, from stars to planets, with folkloric connotations. In Ahmed’s La Dame Lune “Chondraboti”, a highly textured steel sculpture with discernible facial features, Greek mythology is combined with a reference to a Bengali female poet, projecting female power and agency.
Snakes are also referenced throughout the exhibition, present in both Ahmed and Mrinalini’s work. These serpents or nagas – divine or semi-divine creatures that take both snake and human form – embody the borderline between animals and the anthropomorphic categories of beings (men, gods and demons).
In Hinduism the snake is both a sacred and sinister presence, often appearing in cobra-like form. In L’envoûtement (The Spell) and Un Serpent Nommé Désir (A Snake Called Desire), Ahmed alludes to an image of Buddha framed by the hood of a cobra.
Crafting with inbetween materials
Across the artworks on display, the way in which the materials are used – rather like the mythologies and deities – are open in their connotations, transmitting a sense of in-betweenness.
Mrinalini’s knotted hemp sculptures turn textiles into solid objects that are both dynamic and robust. Hemp was historically used in South Asia for garments, ropes and sails. These works combine decoration created through knots and folds with a material associated with the practicality of ropes and carrying heavy loads.
In Mrinalini’s work, ceramic and metal fold to mimic fabric or botanical and fabric becomes dense. Metal has a basket-like appearance in Meera Mukherjee’s (no relation) two works, Untitled and Boatmen, as if it has been woven not cast. In contrast, in her sculptures Atomic Couple and Time Past, Pilloo Pochkhanawala uses leftover industrial metal scraps combined with stones to create jagged sculptures like ruins or remnants in a post-industrial landscape.
Ahmed’s Bangladesh, a bronze sculpture featuring seemingly cut out shapes could arguably sit in relation to these two works, yet here possibly sinister figures with cut out eyes emerge from the landscape. Having spent time in Nepal learning traditional wood carving, Leela’s wooden sculptures are bulbous chiselled forms, in which the bulges can be seen as a series of heavy but overinflated folds.
Folds also feature in Meera’s work in bronze, Bou, which depicts a Bengali woman perhaps wearing a hijab. The patterning framing her face recalls the folds of the head covering and textile patterns of a sari. Created in the 1980s, this work was made in aftermath of the religious violence of partition and in the decade after the Bangladesh liberation war. The relationship between garments and folds is underlined by photographs of Mrinalini in her studio, working in a sari.
The versatility of sari folding perhaps bears some resemblance to the folds in Mrinalini’s work, with the female form implied in many instances. She has described sculpture as “a kind of organic unfolding”. The fold as the cusp of unfurling or unfolding, of providing a revelation.
The work of these five artists form connections between themselves and craft practices stretching back in these locations for hundreds of years and the contemporary worlds of post-independence India and Bangladesh. The works represent the fluidity of female voices as shape-shifters that navigate the material cultures and traditions around them in diverse and individual ways, allowing their voices to create a powerful throng.
Unbound Forms is on show at The Hepworth Wakefield until 1 November.
Hannah Sabapathy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.