The ‘Little People’
“These ‘little people’, interlinked, became my medium. Over time, they have appeared in my work in all kinds of ways — especially when invoking the ephemeral.” - KS Radhakrishnan
In the early 90s, Radhakrishnan made his own studio at the southern edge of Delhi, in Chhatarpur Pahadi. He witnessed rural migrants pouring into the area looking for livelihood and a better life, making their cubicle-like houses which was all they could afford. A lot of the inhabitants’ daily lives spilled over outside these ‘human boxes’, into the lanes. He observed their aspirations and struggles with sympathy.
Thus, the ‘Human Boxes’ series came up. Hundreds of miniature anonymous human figures and a box-like form on which they stood or fell from, which they held up and flowed outwards from. Over time, these ‘little people’, became Radhakrishnan’s way of invoking the intangible and continue being so. They became thoughts emerging from a head or light from a lantern. In a series of nostalgic pieces, they become steam arising from the idli-makers of his childhood, the aroma arising from an old tiffin box, or the milk spilling out of a pot.
The sculptor enjoys how these figures, despite being made of bronze, are delicate and almost weightless. They create solidity but also porosity. “The wind can flow through them and they can flow like the wind… When they emerge, they are people formed as a collective. That collective is the life of my sculpture.”
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.
