Balance

Sculpture, whether we like it or not, comes a close second to painting, and women sculptors in the twentieth century came way further down the line. Meera Mukherjee, however, turned the set proclivities of society on their head when she forged her own destiny as one of India’s earliest modernist sculptors, rendered rarer with her being a woman at a time when not many women were taking up the arts professionally. This large sculpture, like most of her other works of this scale, comprises four parts that have been put together by welding. The welding marks have deliberately been left visible to add texture, context and character to the work. For those interested in a deeper study, it is not just an aesthetic piece but an ethnographic piece drawing from the artist’s vast experience of working with tribal communities of central India at the prime of her career.