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“As the fires keep burning, for the 10 or 12 hours that a piece is being fired, I am alert and trying to keep it alive. Sculpture thus becomes a complete, total process. It is like nurturing and nourishing, like making a human being and bringing him to life.” - MEERA MUKHERJEE

Meera Mukherjee's art reflects her deep reverence for her roots, tradition, and history. Her sculptures depict scenes from rural life, often of labourers,... “As the fires keep burning, for the 10 or 12 hours that a piece is being fired, I am alert and trying to keep it alive. Sculpture thus becomes a complete, total process. It is like nurturing and nourishing, like making a human being and bringing him to life.” - MEERA MUKHERJEE

Meera Mukherjee's art reflects her deep reverence for her roots, tradition, and history. Her sculptures depict scenes from rural life, often of labourers, artisans, and craftspeople engaged in daily work. Her figures are "mostly in a swinging and dancing mood, pleasantly animated or entranced, but in any case fatalistic... She often envelopes the figures into ornamental structures thus giving the impression that the people are part of a greater whole and that their existence is defined by causality and higher order." (Dr Clelia Segieth, Remembering Meera Mukherjee, Bernried: Buchheim Museum, 2012, p. 7)

This is evident in Trellis, where several human figures are collectively engrossed in building a large structure. Their limbs are entwined around each other and the intersecting components of the structure, imbuing the sculpture with a dynamic and free-flowing quality.

Mukherjee was profoundly inspired by her experience apprenticing with sculptors in the Bastar region of Madhya Pradesh. She learned the lost wax or cire perdue method of bronze sculpting employed by them, locally known as Dhokra and said to be in practice in the area for over 4,500 years. While she had encountered the technique in Munich as well, she was particularly moved by the Bastar sculptors' deep spiritual connection with their process. She sought to incorporate these learnings, and recontextualise the method for a contemporary setting. "Working with these great craftsmen I could sense the excitement I felt thinking that here the same hands and fingers were at work that had crafted those great Tanjore bronze figures and that with them I was part of it. I experienced their complete devotion whilst working on sacred pictures which would be venerated and worshipped and I asked myself, could we modern artists not develop the same spirit of devotion and apply it to our work? Why cannot we experience the same spiritual devotion on creating a figure that is not any more a depiction of a deity but of other worldly matters?" (Artist quoted in Remembering Meera Mukherjee)

Drawing from this, Mukherjee would go on to create her own process where the works were first sculpted in wax and then built up and decorated using wax strips and rolls as is visible in Trellis.

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