The Musui-Maiya series is an instance of inspired outpouring. While Radhakrishnan was on it, another front opened slowly, a new path marked by a series collectively called Human Boxes. Ostensibly it appears to lead us away from all that the Musui-Maiya series represents, yet, on closer look it also comes across as a development that complements it. Human Globe is the work that links the two groups of works conceptually. It uses the figures of Musui and Maiya not singly as in his other sculptures but in assemblage. Of the four figures that make the human globe, three are of Musui dancing on a single leg and
forming an arabesque or drawing in the air; not three different figures but replicas of the same form.
The multiplication and twining facilitate the omission of the base in the earliest version, and permits the three dancers to spring from the ground and lift themselves into the air. The compounding also generates a new rhythm and a new interrelation of forms and spaces, and gives the group a greater lightness and animation along with stability. The intertwined multiples of Musui are crowned with a figure of Maiya that amplifies the spirit of dance and rounds it off with a sense of fizzy bubbling over.
Human Globe represents a new approach to sculpture. So far his sculpture was based on rendering into clay and bronze the plasticity and sensuousness of the human body and each sculpture usually consisted of a single figure. Already in the Musui-Maiya series, by making movement which is rendered with the economy of drawing (rather than the physical details of individual bodies) the basis of expressiveness, the ground is laid for a sculptural method based on multiples, grafting and assemblage. This becomes an integral part of his work process in the Human Box series.
HUMAN BOXES
KS Radhakrishnan
We ephemeral humans are made as much of thoughts and ideas, feelings and memories, stories and emotions... as we are of flesh, blood and bone. The Human Box series were created over the last two decades to capture this essence of ours. These works explore, celebrate or mourn the rich and varied aspects of human existence. Many of them look back with intense nostalgia at my childhood memories of rural Kerala – a tribute to the daily experiences that were taken for granted then, and the memories of which are so cherished now.
Bronze as a sculptural medium usually evokes big and solid pieces. But in these pieces, I have found it very exciting and liberating to break that paradigm of bronze sculpting and work with these very small, almost weightless pieces to create insubstantial presences like smoke or aroma. These pieces are works of instinct and feeling, not of planning or calculation.
The idea of the tiny figures was inspired by the many, many people whom I witnessed coming to build their home in the area of Chhatarpur Pahadi in Delhi, where I had made my studio in the 1990s. The land around me was allotted to people from economically weaker sections and I saw their houses coming up like little boxes, which was all they could afford. Slowly these human boxes were filled by the grand sufferings and celebrations of these ‘little people’ trying to build an identity of their own.
I had great sympathy for their efforts to reach out towards the light. Some may have succeeded, some not. I found that these people started becoming the ephemera of my sculptural memories. They have always been in the process of becoming – smoke from a cooking pot, heat from the clothes iron, or flames from the angithi. They are the light from the lamp as well as the desire of the moth for the light.
Life is made up equally of the tangible and the intangible, both are equally significant. In these pieces, the ephemeral finds itself in juxtaposition with that which is more lasting. The pots and bowls, the lantern and the lunchbox, the fan, bucket, bell, lantern… Who among us does not remember such objects and experiences from their childhood? It feels to me as if these pieces, therefore, are a moment from not just my autobiography but the human biography.
