Artist Suvajit Mondal looked visibly elated while setting up his clay-based artworks at Delhi’s Art Heritage gallery. This was days before the opening of a recent group show titled Shape Shifting in which Mondal was a participating artist hand-picked by curator Kristine Michael, herself an established author and ceramicist. “After 10 years of my clay practice, I finally got this opportunity of showcasing my work at a prestigious private art gallery,” gushed Mondal, who is noted for his hyper-realistic ‘urbanscapes’ made using clay-based mediums which incorporate dots, lines, windows, miniature pots and found objects, from horsehair to discarded door frames.

The 35-year-old, who has a fine arts degree from Viswa-Bharati at Santiniketan, has stayed dedicated to his art despite seeing batchmates switch to more lucrative careers. Instead, while practising his craft, Mondal took up multiple stints to self-sustain. He has been an instructor and studio-in-charge of the Ceramic Centre at Sanskriti Kendra, participated in group shows by the government-run Lalit Kala Akademi and India Habitat Centre, sold functional pottery wares at Dastkar and potter’s markets across India. His only prior association with a private gallery—considered a benchmark for artists—is with the fairly new APRE Art House in Mumbai. At present, he is a visiting faculty member at the Indian Institute of Art and Design (IIAD), Okhla, and rents a one-storey studio space called The Potter’s Life, at Chhatarpur in Delhi, which he runs with wife, artist Nandini Sarkar. He also conducts pottery classes at the studio and his earnings go back into paying the rent and maintenance of his home, studio, salaries of the two studio assistants, purchase of clayrelated supplies, etc. 

A costly affair 

Mondal’s situation is not uncommon to emerging and mid-career clay practitioners. While there is a notable post-pandemic boom in hobbyists and serious practitioners of the art in India, the initial years are the toughest. Community studio centres like the Lalit Kala Akademi (Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata), Ceramic Centre (Baroda), Roopankar (Bhopal) are equipped to offer shared space, kiln, clay, electricity and storage on rent at affordable costs, but the challenge begins when one wants to work out of a personal studio. The first purchase is usually a kiln, as every clay-modelled sculpture needs to be fired. A good quality kiln costs anything between Rs. 1.50 lakh and 10 lakh depending on its size. If you are engaged in wheel throwing, a wheel costs between Rs. 45,000 and Rs. 50,000. Slab rollers are priced around the same range and other tools fall between Rs. 10,000 and Rs. 20,000. The initial investment for a basic studio thus starts from Rs. 3 lakh. 

In a bid to make it easy for stakeholders in this ‘expensive’ art, clay suppliers like Mumbai’s Bhoomi Pottery—a one-stop shop for local and imported equipment and clay—collaborate with galleries, institutions and pottery markets on events, and sponsor clay-related materials needed for the workshops and other such interactions conducted. A case in point is the recently concluded Indian Ceramics Triennale (ICT), for which the brand sponsored a sizeable chunk of supplies. “We support their marketing activities, inform our client base and provide clay and tools to help the organisers generate awareness and overcome glitches due to lack of funding,” says the company spokesperson. They sponsor group dinners for the participants as a networking opportunity. 

Efforts made by Bhoomi Pottery to ensure quality and build customer relationship within the contemporary clay community, though seemingly altruistic, have helped create brand presence. “The pottery clay supply market is still a relatively ‘unknown market’ in India,” notes the spokesperson pointing to the huge gap between the high demand and inconsistent supply of certain products from the manufacturers’ end, which leads to orders for select items regularly getting delayed by two to three months. “Occasionally, while going through customs, the imported orders are not handled with care. Local courier companies, too, often leave the orders out in the rain, and we suppliers get stuck with these damaged goods.” Kilns, for that matter, are “fast-moving products”, with 15 to 20 of them sold per month, motivating the brand “to soon touch the 50-kiln marker, and then 100”. 

Like most industries, big cities harbour the maximum opportunities. Smaller places like Goa— despite its influx of tourists, flea markets and creatives settling down there—lack big platforms and the right exposure for clay practitioners. “The same Goan artist, if based in Mumbai or Delhi, would have got miles ahead in their career. For instance, it was at our recent all-women ceramicists show Unearthed when, for the first time, artist Tanushree Singh, who has always sold her work online, got a chance to display it physically and interact with her audiences,” says Sharada Kerkar, Operations Head at Museum of Goa (MOG).

Unlike contemporary art practices, clay mediums are still breaking away from the traditional mould of their perception as a craft form, and face limitations while attempting certain themes. Like political satire, says Shirley Bhatnagar, a Dehradunbased ceramicist and teacher at the UPES School of Design, who was selected by the ICT to represent India at the British Ceramics Biennial in 2019, supported by the Charles Wallace India Trust. Despite such laurels, her anthropomorphic crockery works like ‘The Broken Promised’, shown at ICT 2018, that connoted false assurances of politicians across the world, didn’t get the desired reception. “The narrative of my work includes humour. Which is difficult because not everyone finds everything funny. One of my works quoted Lalu Prasad Yadav promising to make Bihar’s roads as smooth as Hema Malini’s cheeks. The press did not write about my work, however, the security guards and Hindi speakers at the show struck up a conversation with me because I had used the Devanagari script.”

Accessibility: a double-edged sword? 

Bhatnagar finds it liberating to see clay supplies being delivered to the doorstep, especially since she had to do her own firing, mixing clay, making glazes, colours and stains, since her graduation in 1998, “when nothing was available”. This kind of accessibility, however, can prove limiting with the Indian market having only a handful of good suppliers, all of them sourcing from the same set of manufacturers and local and imported brands for clay, colour stains, glazes, kilns and wheels. This ‘sameness’, feels Bhatnagar, trickles into the artworks. “Like a snake eating its own tail,” she says. While she has made the switch to readymade products, she still produces a few of her favourite glazes. Artist Vinod Daroz, meanwhile, makes all his glazes. “I find glazing to be like cooking. It needs to be sampled for quality. Every time I create glazes, I always do a test batch. I find readymade glazes a bit flat. They are fired at 1240 to 1260 degrees Celsius, while I fire my works at 1280 to 1300 degrees and find a marked difference.”

The sameness, alas, also extends to concepts ripped off from Instagram or Pinterest posts of other artists. “About 10 years ago, I could find only a handful of artists on Instagram doing anthropomorphic clay works. Now, there are over 100. I belong to that generation of artists who created from scratch and turned to art books for inspiration. Sadly, the young are only bombarded with images online, which become their inspiration,” notes Bhatnagar. 

Light at the end of the tunnel

“It’s tough as a full-time ceramicist, without the crutches of a monthly pay package. If you give your 100 per cent, opportunities come your way. The struggle makes you an all-rounder. You learn to hustle, produce and sell commercial crockery and also sustain your art practice,” says Mondal, who has four group exhibitions lined up in 2024 alone “If your work is good, people will help you,” says Daroz, recalling the instance when a benefactor reached out and offered him studio space for free, which he availed for almost 11 years. Daroz has been privy to the creative processes of noted ceramicists— he is the nephew of P. R. Daroz and was a student of Jyotsna Bhatt. But it is only after 25 years of working in the medium that he could finally afford to build his own studio this year: a one-storey, 25,000 squarefoot space in Vadodara. The artist, known for his nature-inspired themes and erotic motifs outlined in 24-karat gold to symbolise oneness, is currently doing a residency on invitation at the Wangou Taoxichuan International Studio in China. “My 22-inch clay platters that sold for Rs. 5,000, are now valued at Rs. 1 lakh,” he adds, hinting at the immense scope and reach of clay. One of the oldest human inventions is casting new moulds, one which is gratifying to the creator, on both monetary and aesthetic fronts.

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Pull Quote 1: “After 10 years of my clay practice, I finally got this opportunity of showcasing my work at a prestigious private art gallery,” says Suvajit Mondal, noted for his hyper-realistic ‘urbanscapes’ which incorporate dots, lines, windows, miniature pots and found objects from horsehair to discarded door frames

Pull Quote 2: The pottery clay supply market is still a relatively ‘unknown market’ in India. There is a huge gap between the high demand and inconsistent supply of certain products from the manufacturers’ end, which leads to orders getting delayed by two to three months.

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This article was originally published in the August 2024 issue of ON Stage.

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