Dutta's own work is never eclipsed by Mukherjee's excerpted contributions. In fact, Nestled is so tenderly put together, using clever modes of display, like the open-ended wooden shelf-like structure, that it allows room for the visual conversation to transpire and percolate. The Kantha stitches resonate in Dutta's ink drawings through his elaborate and painstaking brush strokes. The centrepiece is Vestige, his bronze study of a fallen tree, a work that was being processed during my studio visit in February 2020, when Dutta, along with his sculptor-assistants were encasing the dis-membered plaster cast's interior with red wax. I observed the hollow interior of Dutta's study of an uprooted tree being layered with hot wax as it was readied for the final casting to be made in bronze. It felt like a visual metaphor for the osmotic nature of Dutta's relationship with Mukherjee. Nestled makes public some of the vestiges of their conversations, and reveals the many afterlives of Mukherjee's artisanal legacy. It feels like a triumphant celebration of the brazenly non-canonical. The iconic nature of the 'nest' as safe space and playground is evolved through the evocative Kantha stitches, through Dutta's scrupulous mark-making, through the patinas he arrives at in his Topographical Specimens and his bronze works that are odes to the compositional elegance of collapsible street shops in Kolkata, and his private investigation into tracing erosions and making visible the tension of bound things in Marks. The show delights in the literal and metaphorical equivalence between the intuitive, resourceful gathering integral to nest-making and the practised frugality, inherited intelligences, and nurturing potential of craft traditions. As a feminist viewer, it feels satisfyingly audacious to see a male artist embrace a legacy so avowedly non-canonical, so lovingly indebted to artisanal grace.

Meera Mukherjee

Master Strokes

The Afterlives of Stitches