Mrinalini Mukherjee: In the Creative Element Immerse

This book is a tribute to the singularity of Mrinalini Mukherjee's sculptural imagination. It celebrates a body of work that occupies a unique position in contemporary art, not least because of the originality of its contribution to the language of sculptural form. Central to her innovatory practice was Mukherjee's intuitively dialectical understanding of the interplay of art and craft - as epitomized by her famous signature use of natural fibre as her elected medium, and by the equipoise, subtle yet daring, that her sculptures maintained between these terms. The transformation of nature into art, to borrow the title of Ananda Coomaraswamy's famous treatise on the subject, remained the leitmotif of the work she went on to make in ceramic and bronze. Deepak Ananth's monographic essay on Mukherjee's multifaceted oeuvre is interspersed with an exceptional array of images - archival, art-historical, affective: an album of real and elective affinities evocative as a portrait of the artist and the poetics of her practice.