Wilderness 1
Habitat
Mechanism
2023 | Ceramic materials, earthenware glazes, oxides, slips
Celebrating the exuberance of life, Vinita Mungi’s ceramic sculptures are a series of biotic playgrounds. With their surfaces coated with candy-coloured slips and glazes, the objects express the limitless patterns in nature. For Common Ground, Vinita Mungi has created her most ambitious ceramic sculpture yet.
The artist renders ideas of fluidity and spontaneity with labyrinthine arrangements informed by frameworks of tree-trunks or branches. Their surfaces are colonized by oblong shells, sea sponges, tubular mushrooms, and miscellaneous organic matter, speaking explicitly of co-existence. Embodying tactile qualities, the biospheres especially in Mechanism are multi-layered, multi-storeyed, with bulbous swellings, and spiky protrusions. The forms with their undulating topographies teem with fecund female forms as well as phallic imagery. Imbued with sensuous – even carnal – qualities, the sculptures invite reconsiderations of broader issues surrounding markers of sexuality and notions of vulnerability.
VINITA MUNGI is a Mumbai-based artist, who received her BFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2017. Confronting western-centric perspectives that her training was largely informed by, she began looking at artists, activists and poets belonging to the Post-colonial feminist movement as a way to introspect upon her own identity and orientations in the world. These meditations, combined with a rigorous and intimate engagement with her medium, inform her explorations of relationships between bodies and objects, daily life, and intimate spheres.
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