Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms
This summer, the Hepworth Wakefield brings together five women sculptors from India and Bangladesh whose work spans the decades after independence, several of them shown side by side in the UK for the first time. At its centre is Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015), whose hemp macramé sculptures remain among the most singular achievements in twentieth-century sculpture, alongside her mother Leela Mukherjee, Meera Mukherjee (no relation), Novera Ahmed and Pilloo Pochkhanawala.
Portrait of a young Meera Mukherjee. Courtesy and Copyright of Akar Prakar and the Meera Mukherjee Estate.
Mukherjee was born in Mumbai two years after partition, the daughter of artists Benode Behari and Leela Mukherjee, and grew up at Kala Bhavana, Tagore's art college in West Bengal, where her father taught. She studied at Baroda and later at West Surrey College of Art and Design, working across four decades and several continents, from Mauritius to the Netherlands, moving through murals, fibre, clay and finally bronze.
Mrinalini Mukherjee, Adi Pushp II, 1998-99. Dyed hemp, 140 × 112 × 94 cm. Private collection. © Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation.
It's the fibre work that anchors the show. Mukherjee built her sculptures from hemp, knotting for months at a time in a dense, layered macramé technique entirely of her own devising. She described the process as "unfolding," even though the finished pieces are the result of laborious, deliberate folding and tying by hand. Rather than hanging flat or holding a fixed silhouette, the sculptures slide down walls, coil across floors and rise up from the ground, treating the surrounding architecture as part of the composition. Her studio notes for installing one such piece, Nag Devta II (1979), read almost like care instructions: mould the shape back into place by hand, then vacuum clean with a brush head.
View of "Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms - Women sculptors of India and Bangladesh," at The Hepworth Wakefield, 2026. Image courtesy of The Hepworth Wakefield. Photo by Anya Fiáine-Fox.
That instinctive relationship with material was built on research as much as feel. Mukherjee documented rope makers and dyers on her travels and assembled an extensive personal collection of saris and woven textiles, which shaped her sense of colour, drape and structure long before it reached her sculptures.
Mrinalini Mukherjee, Ritu Raja, 1977. Image: New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala © 2020
Curators Tarini Malik and Laura Smith avoid giving the exhibition one single throughline. Instead, works are grouped for comparison across the five sculptors, tracing what Malik calls the "matrilineages" of South Asian women working in sculpture after independence. Novera Ahmed's bronze serpents sit near Mukherjee's own coiled hemp snake deity. Meera Mukherjee's cast bronzes, Pilloo Pochkhanawala's aluminium and concrete forms, and Leela Mukherjee's drawings all draw on vernacular craft methods, weaving, casting, reuse, to push at what sculpture could be during a period of sweeping political and cultural change. That same hands-on relationship with material runs through this rare gathering of women who each found new structural possibilities in textile and craft traditions.
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Further Information:
Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms - Women Sculptors of India and Bangladesh is on now at The Hepworth Wakefield, UK, until 1 November 2026.
Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation
@mrinalinimukherjee.foundation
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Image Credits:
Lead: Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015), Experiments in Khirki Studio, 1985. Photo Ranjit Singh. Digitised by Asia Art Archive, India. Copyright Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation
All further images as credited in captions.