Important Notice

“My practice explores the performative intersection between sculpture and installation and is informed by my consistent engagement with the sensuous materiality of clay. My focus predicates the possibilities and challenges of meditative multiples and immersive installations, through which I contemplate the ever-changing concepts of space and place.” – Madhvi Subrahmanian

Artist, writer and curator Madhvi Subrahmanian is renowned for... “My practice explores the performative intersection between sculpture and installation and is informed by my consistent engagement with the sensuous materiality of clay. My focus predicates the possibilities and challenges of meditative multiples and immersive installations, through which I contemplate the ever-changing concepts of space and place.” – Madhvi Subrahmanian

Artist, writer and curator Madhvi Subrahmanian is renowned for her distinctive use of ceramics and clay as an artistic medium. Born in 1962, Subrahmanian studied pottery at Golden Bridge Pottery in Pondicherry, under renowned ceramicist Ray Meeker, before pursuing a postgraduate degree in Fine Art from the Meadows School of Arts in Dallas, Texas.

Subrahmanian’s work is rooted in her own personal history. Her migratory life, particularly the challenges and opportunities of constant relocation, is frequently referenced in her work. She uses personal memory, along with collective experiences, to create sculptures and installations that are effectively captivating and immersive.

As articulated by art critic Nancy Adajania in the 2017 exhibition catalogue of the artist’s show: “In her evolving practice, Madhvi has endeavoured to disturb formalist abstraction (of an object maker). She has experimented with a range of processes, both formal and informal, and allowed the factor of chance to gamble against set protocols; she is a partisan of low firing, hand-building, smoke marks, cracks, holes, cavities and surface impurities. She favours mandala-shaped assemblages, those fail-safe guarantees of holistic selfhood, but is also keen on spirals that spin away from the centre and find their own trajectories. She does not differentiate between clay and skin. She kneads and ‘grows’ seeds, pods, cones, trees; she once made a mould of her pregnant belly… Madhvi is a comrade and co-conspirator of clay; time and gravity are her adversaries. She records the shadows of arrow-shaped roads; time wipes them out. She challenges gravity; she builds high, higher, not out of hubris, but because she knows that ‘if you push clay against its will, it pushes right back’...” (Mapping Memory, Mumbai: Chemould Prescott Road, 2017, online)

The artist is also a founding member and curator of the Indian Ceramics Triennale. She lives and works between Mumbai and Singapore.

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