Notes
executed 1985/6
'Mukherjee has always enjoyed subverting conventions. She prefers to explore the hidden character of the material, its tactile potential, its ability to express a daring yet subtle eroticism, its power to contain within it an organic fecundity.' (Ella Datta, Art India, Vol. XI, Issue IV, Quarter IV, 2006, p. 214). Mrinalini Mukherjee studied painting at the M. S. University, Baroda between 1965 and 1970, followed by her post-diploma in mural design under K.G. Subramanyan. In 1971 Mukherjee received a British Council scholarship for sculpture and worked at the West Surrey College of art and design in Farnham, U.K. It was around this time that she made her first major impact in the international art world with works made from a knotted natural fiber. Since then she has participated in many distinguished group shows and held several solo exhibitions. In 1994-95, she was invited by the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford to mount an exhibition of her fiber sculptures. The show traveled to several cities in the U.K. The current work, however, titled Apsara predates this exhibition and was first exhibited in Mumbai in 1986. The artist is reluctant to reveal her inspiration for her works or the references that inspire her as she feels each work should speak for itself. Yet she admits that she starts with an idea and then 'lets it grow.' 'I think they all have a relationship with the human form. I think the earlier works maybe started with the idea of a plant or some form of nature, but they sort of took on a human scale and gradually became more human.' (Mukherjee in conversation with Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton and William Furlong, Audio Arts Magazine, Volume 13, Number 4, 1993). The knotted sculptures grow from a metal armature and a vague notion of what she would like to create; this slowly evolving creative process is inspired by the natural world and usually incorporates elements that are associated with the Indian female principle, revealing strong undertones of the erotic that manifest themselves in her luscious undulating forms and orifices. Deepak Ananth notes that the choice of a natural fiber for the sculptures reflects the influence of her professor K G Subramanyan who encouraged his students to be inspired by the richly varied forms produced by a long and continuous tradition of Indian artisans working within the loosely termed 'craft' movement. The inspiration to use a material more closely associated with these varied craft traditions rather than 'High Art' reflects her teacher's conscious attempts to overcome the 'stale polarity of Modernism in India'. (Deepak Ananth, Mrinalini Mukherjee, The Knots are many but the thread is one, Art Asia Pacific, Vol 3, No 4, 1996). 'As if in harmony with the vegetal realm from which her medium is derived, the leading metaphor of Mukherjee's work comes from the organic life of plants. Improvising upon a motif or image that serves as her starting point the work's gradual unfolding itself becomes analogous to the stirring into maturation of a sapling. The tough, hand dyed hemp fibers (the matte lushness of their hues recalling jungle flora) twisted and knotted around an initial, fairly rudimentary armature, are as it were roped into a logic of inexorable growth. Possessed of something of the heavy langourousness of tropical vegetation, the resulting forms are instinct with the luxuriance of proliferating root, unfurling leaf, burgeoning flower...In a slow upsurge from the ground the frontality of coiled tumescence and swollen declivity betokens an exuberant implantation in the soil of the erotic; these totems are the avatars of an (abstracted) iconography of roused sentience.' (ibid.) Despite the clear influence of organic vegetal forms in her sculptures, the early fiber sculptures also have an undeniably anthropomorphic element to them which is further reinforced by their titles such as Yakshi and Apsara, deities that are traditionally represented in anthropomorphic forms. In the first instance the form alludes to forest deities associated with early pre-Vedic fertility cults and thus has direct relevance to the organic form that evolves in her sculpture, in the latter the form refers to the deities of the heavens, under the control of Indra. Under his direction they seduced mortals, kings and sages, who were attempting to threaten the balance of power between mortals and the demi-Gods. The reference to the heavenly realm is reflected in the design of the sculpture, which unlike her other fiber forms that appear to emerge from the ground, is instead suspended above the floor. Potentially of equal associative relevance to the artist is the fact that gandharvas the male counterparts to apsaras were the custodians of the music and the arts. The artist states 'my anthropomorphic deities owe much to the equation with awe and reverence that traditional invocatory deity inspires in her spectator. But my mythology is de-conventionalised and personal, as indeed are my methods and materials...My idea of the sacred is not rooted in any specific culture. To me it is a feeling that I may get in a church, mosque, temple, or forest. The countryside is filled with places where divinity dwells...My inspiration and visual stimuli come from all over the world, from museum objects and artifacts and more immediately from my environment.' (Mrinalini Mukherjee, Interview with Chrissies Iles, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1994, p. 12). Deepak Ananth suggests that the spiritual references in her works are 'harnessed with the desire to create a heirophany, as if the knotted mesh were a receptacle for the numen, even while continuing to be a sculpture.' Although the artist is reluctant to associate her work with any specific inspiration from any religious or mythological tradition she accepts that her sculptures may take on a 'ceremonial presence'. Whatever the inspiration for work it seems that the creative process, a lengthy and endlessly repeated action of knotting, can be seen as a form of ritualized practice that takes on a higher significance both for the artist and those who witness the final completed form. 'I'm interested in the idea of presence. When finishing something I almost feel in awe of it.' (Mukherjee in conversation with Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton and William Furlong, Audio Arts Magazine, Volume 13, Number 4, 1993). In the fiber sculptures, from the initial seed of inspiration through a lengthy process of creation Mukherjee appears to achieve some sense of heightened consciousness in the folds and crevices of her knotted forms that allows many levels of associative thought to evolve into a single coherent form, that expresses sexuality, eroticism and the presence of a the 'divine other.' As Ella Datta states, 'The secret of Mukherjee's intense imagination perhaps lies buried in the subliminal layers of her consciousness where desire, fulfillment and fruition create exciting tropes.' (Ella Datta, Art India, Vol. XI, Issue IV, Quarter IV, 2006, p. 214).
