A new book examines sculptor Meera Mukherjee’s legacy to look closely at artistic labour
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A gigantic female figure opens a window high above her head to look out into the sky. Her face is turned away from viewers as her massive arms pull up the shutters. When this work by Meera Mukherjee was first exhibited in the galleries of the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata, in 1993, it carried the title Akash [Sky]. The centre-piece of that exhibition, it towered towards the ceiling of the room, appearing to push itself out into the open. Like her other larger-than-life figures, this sculpture also seemed to demand its place under the open skies, although its permanent home would become the gallery of another Birla art museum in Hyderabad. Like its counterparts of similar or bigger scale, the figure too is made in many parts that were cast in a furnace in molten metal out of clay core units and elaborately striated wax moulds, with its limbs, torso and head later welded together. This piece of Mukherjee is by no means her finest. It cannot claim for itself the majesty and elegiac quality of the two monumental figures that signpost two ends of her career – Ashoka at Kalinga (completed in 1972), which marked her...