Mrinalinee Mukherjee
In conversation with Majorie Allthorpe-Guyton and William Furlong. Mukherjee, one of India's leading contemporary artists, speaks about her imposing woven and knotted scupture using industrial hemp, coloured with vegetable dyes. Interview recorded in 1991 in advance of her exhibition, 'New Sculpture' at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford from April to May 1994.
from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 13 Number 4, 1993
Transcript
In conversation with Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton and William Furlong Mrinalinee Mukherjee visited England in 1991 in advance of her exhibition, ‘New Sculpture’ at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford from April to May 1994. On the earlier occasion, Mukherjee, one of India’s leading contemporary artists spoke about her imposing woven and knotted sculpture using industrial hemp, coloured with vegetable dyes.
William Furlong: How do you define the making of an installation and is it fairly unique in India?
Mrinalinee Mukherjee: Yes, in the sense that a lot of the sculpture in India is still produced in bronze or in marble, in very permanent materials; which is I think maybe left over from the Colonial period because we don’t really have tradition of pedestal sculpture.
Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton: No, because your tradition is relief sculpture.
MM: Yes, our tradition is relief sculpture incorporated with architecture.
WF: So, are you saying that there is a sense of you breaking with a tradition?
MM: Yes, but my work is in a different medium it doesn’t lend itself to the pedestal.
WF: I just wonder if you’re breaking from a tradition that is to do with the relief?
MM: No I think I’ve been very interested in the relief because my work started from the relief.
WF: I wonder to what extent your works have a relationship with the place that they are exhibited in?
MM: These last things are commissions, so I have done them specifically for a place.
MA-G: So these are public commissions or are these privately....
MM: No, most of them have been public commissions.
WF: Can you talk a little bit about the material that you use?
MM: Yes, it’s a natural material, which is grown in India, it’s like hemp, but it’s not hemp.
WF: Jute?
MM: No it’ not jute but it may be flax or hemp or something in-between that.
WF: I wondered if you could now elaborate a little bit on the references in the individual works?
MM: I would not like to do that because I feel that the work should speak for itself.
WF: Sure, but when you decide to make a work do you have an idea in your head?
MM: I have an idea of the type of image that I want and then I have to prepare the materials and then I let, let it grow.
WF: Do you make preparatory drawings?
MM: Not really, no.
WF: Is it a misreading to interpret the ones that I’ve seen in the book as seeming to have a relationship to the human form?
MM: No, I think they all have a relationship to the human form. I think the earlier works maybe started with the idea of a plant or some form from nature, but they sort of took on a human scale and gradually became more human. The last few works are particularly more figurative.
WF: Some of the others remind me more of totems and symbolic images of the human form.
MM: They don’t come from any traditional mythology.
WF: Is there any relationship between your interests and Indian relief sculpture. There are occasions here where I’m reminded of that tradition.
MM: I respond to things from all over the world; I respond to Romanesque sculpture to Michelangelo.
MA-G: ...the richness of Romanesque carving is the intricate the way things are interleaved and open up...
MM: And the way they are connected with the architecture is different to say the High Renaissance. There must be so many objects from all over the world and within India that we have a collective memory of.
WF: I wondered how you perceived the Western art phenomena of Europe and America, living and working as an artist in India, which has a network and a structure supporting and promoting art.
MM: Yes, but here it is supported by the galleries and commerce which in India it does not. So we work in a different context and maybe we have more freedom. I can still hire a space and have an exhibition, which may be hard living in England, and it must be much harder for people who leave art schools in England and maybe after that are not able to do work.
WF: To what extent you feel any empathy towards the preoccupations and content of the work going on in Europe?
MM: Well a lot of artists are travelling to India and are influenced by India. But they will be influenced by India in a different way from an artist living in India. This is the question of the exotic. And one is living and working in India out of choice. A lot of us have had the chance to live somewhere else. I wouldn’t mind going somewhere and working for a short time but I know that I want to be living and working in India. To live and work in India I find the most comfortable. My work is very physical and the involvement of my own body I find more comfortable in India. It just the whole way of losing your body and it is a bit different to living here. So this is fairly personal and in the context of my work.
MA-G: How is the work made because it’s very sensuous?
MM: It is knotted, you know, and sometimes these things are much heavier than me.
MA-G: So it’s all knotted and you start from one sheet, or section, and then build?
MM: Yes.
WF: It seems, in the later pieces, to evoke the idea of the ceremonial presence.
MM: Well, I’m interested in the idea of presence. When I finish something I almost feel in awe of it.
WF: Could say a bit more about your relationship as an artist with your environment and the culture within which you are working?
MM: Environment meaning that, as I said it’s a physical thing you know like sitting in somebody’s house and after a while you don’t know who’s body sat spinning and I just want to start you know. It is something as simple as that; it’s a way of life. Like the material I’m using; when I started working with it, it was a common material, easily available and not that expensive. Unfortunately now, because of plastics, it’s not that easy, but then it was something that I could buy off the streets. So it’s not like the sculptors here, if you talk about Bill Woodrow, it might be easy for him to get a washing machine or something like but it’s not so easy for me to get something like that.
MA-G: The artists that you’ve seen, Anthony Gormley, David Mark, Anish Kapoor, they are all part of what’s known as the New British Sculpture. Do you see much in common between these British sculptors?
MM: Well, one thing one sees in common among them, probably not Gormley is that they are not figurative. When they see my work they say, we like your earlier work more.
WF: What about Richard Long, have you seen his show?
MM: I saw the show and I liked some of the large pieces very much because I felt that they had a presence.
WF: Have you felt, as an artist working elsewhere, excluded from the debates happening in the West?
MM: No, I don’t think one feels that because it’s about the market, and if the debate’s about other things that may interest us then we have the same debate. But we don’t have access many magazines.
WF: I’m interested to know, if there was a conversation between yourself and other artists in India about priorities and preoccupations, what would that conversation include?
MM: The painters are preoccupied with their own environment, where they live. There’s a big upsurge of Hinduism in India now, but for me that’s not something to talk about but actually we’re having too many communal tensions which disturb me. I am interested in my own tradition, my own environment. There’s a visual tradition and to me it matters that I go to a different village and see different things, see different shops. I feel uncomfortable that I can travel from here to the next town and the next town and I see the painting? After staying here for couple of months I can’t stand it any more. We have a living tradition of different types of craft; we have tribal painters and formal sculptors; and we are functioning in that context. I would like it if they see my work and get something out of seeing my work.