Florescence 2

Mrinalini Mukherjee, who studied under the guidance of her father, one of India’s foremost modernists, Benode Behari Mukherjee, worked with a range of mediums but came to be known for her experiments with an unconventional material, hemp. Her painstakingly knotted hemp figures and sculptures and her phallic clay figures and glazed ceramic vases, with their multi-fold twists, curves and overlapping layers (some of the elements visible in Florescence 2) communicate her feminist message through the body represented in fragments, but also of a lush, fecund world. Her works contain ‘mysterious folds and orifices, intricate curves and drapes.’ Often sensual, they also pay obeisance to the sacred—Mukherjee’s nod to forces in nature beyond the capacity of science to unravel.