“Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms”

Handwritten in black ink on a sheet of A4 paper are Mrinalini Mukherjee’s studio instructions for installing Nag Devta II (1979), one of her large-scale hemp macramé sculptures. The rules are set out in numbered points. Step 10: “The sculpture should be molded into shape with hands to maintain the critical dimensions and shape.” Point 12: “The sculpture is to be vacuum cleaned with a brush head after installation.”

The former instruction suggests an intuitive, artisanal, embodied relationship with the organic material from which the work is made; the latter is modern and pragmatic. They capture something of the uncategorizable quality, or resistance to familiar critical categories, that many associate with Mukherjee’s work. “Unbound Forms,” a survey of Mukherjee and four other women sculptors of India and Bangladesh, offers a more expansive vision of this artist, who has been described as neither formal nor iconographic.1 A modernist, but not contemporary.2 Whose macramé works are not fiber art, nor post-minimalism, nor craft.3 Even Mukherjee’s own description suggests this intriguing resistance: she has used the word “unfolding” to describe what these works do, yet the works themselves are made of heavy fabric that has been—laboriously—folded.4

Is this perceived multivalence inherent to Mukherjee’s work, or is it Anglo-American critical ignorance of her contexts and inventions? Mukherjee was born in Mumbai in 1949, two years after the partition of British India. She studied in Baroda and West Surrey, and worked across continents, from Mauritius to the Netherlands, making murals, then a series of sculptures in hemp fiber, then clay, then bronze. “Unbound Forms,” curated by Tarini Malik and Laura Smith, expands on the Royal Academy’s 2025 exhibition “Mukherjee and Her Circle.” The Hepworth situates her work in the twentieth-century histories of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan after colonization; and in the global contexts in which she worked and studied with her near-contemporaries: Meera Mukherjee (no relation—b. 1923, Kolkata); Novera Ahmed (b. 1939, Sundarbans); Pilloo Pochkhanawala (b. 1923, Mumbai); and Mrinalini’s mother Leela Mukherjee (b. 1916, Sindh).

The instruction to vacuum-clean Nag Devta II made me think of my own mother. She likes a clean house, and if somebody were to put her in charge of a hemp macramé sculpture, I strongly suspect she would hoover it. But this five-woman exhibition is not about maternity or domestic labor. If it is feminist, it’s formally so. The curatorial approach recalls the literary genre of the constellation novel—a story that does not proceed as a single linear narrative, but as a network or tapestry of stories that pick up on one another. Refrains gather, and shift, over the course of the juxtapositions, and it is from these shifting points of contact that the story acquires meaning.

“Unbound Forms” doesn’t assert any one line of heritage or influence, but delicately picks out connections. There are many explanatory wall texts, no dominant narrative. Works are often gathered together comparatively on a single table or plinth. This isn’t an immersive experience, tailored for emotional reaction, but a show about the history of ideas and how they moved through five lifetimes of work in global sculpture.

Leela, Mrinalini, and Meera all spent time at Santiniketan school in eastern India. Ahmed and Pochkhanawala were interested in European modernism and the work of Henry Moore, who Meera Mukherjee met. Ahmed and Meera Mukherjee innovated with regional Indian vernacular processes, Ahmed drawing on the shapes and motifs of Eastern Bengal’s folk art; Mukherjee on the “lost wax” technique she learned from metalworkers in Madhya Pradesh. Mrinalini Mukherjee’s macramé snake deity relates to Ahmed’s undulating bronze serpents (1971–72); Pochkhanawala’s small aluminum Germination (ca. 1984) to Mrinalini’s bulging ceramic Blooms (1990–2000). In 2015, Mrinalini had a homecoming survey show in New Delhi; Ahmed had one in Dhaka. Both died the same year.

The tracing and multiplying of points of connections is an elegant response to these works, many of which fold several embodiments into a single object. Ahmed’s bronze L’oiseau Papillon, Garuda (1971–73) represents the wallcreeper, a bird that looks like a butterfly, and also Garuda, an eagle-like divine being in Hindu and Buddhist tradition, national symbol for Thailand and Indonesia. It’s an Alpine-Pyrenean-Thai-Indonesian bird-butterfly-spirit-eagle, in mineral form. It has a nubbly body, flat-winged and bug-eyed.d

The metamorphic crossing of one form, place, and history with another is seen throughout the exhibition, yet the works themselves are all still. The materials are bronze, concrete, stone, ceramic, wood. Nothing is mobilized—not so much as a dangling feather that could waver in a breeze. What is striking, in the presence of Mukherjee’s famous textile works, is their heft. (They don’t reproduce well.) Their hovering forms preside and emanate. This captured, distilled energy is also a quality of Meera Mukherjee’s delicate bronze model of two men in a skiffing boat, Untitled (Boatsmen) (ca. 1970s–’90s); in Leela Mukherjee’s loose washed ink-and-watercolor drawings of figures dancing, playing instruments, and twirling parasols (Untitled, 1992); and in Mrinalini’s late, incandescent bronzes made of flamelike leaves layered suggestively into creaturely sculptures. Emergent forms arise at different temporalities and spaces, from micro (Mrinalini Mukherjee’s roughened bronze Nucleus XII, 2006), to macro (Ahmed’s steel Sun, 2013). Being one-thing-and-another doesn’t present, here, as a problem of logic but as a property of matter as it moves through scales, forms, and worlds.