Palmscape IX

Mrinalini Mukherjee, primarily known for her fiber sculptures, began working with bronze in the early 2000s using the lost wax process. Palmscape IX is the last work Mukherjee created in her life and represents her apotheosis in bronze. While driving around Delhi with her driver Santosh, Mukherjee would often stop and collect all types of plant fragments to cast, which would eventually become part of these sculptures. Each sculpture follows somewhat the diktat of depicting a scape, a long internode forming the basal part or whole of the peduncle. Scapes are usually leafless; Mukherjee’s sculpted scapes paradoxically are well-endowed with other features and textures—foliage wrapping around like lamina, scarred and bruised with rapine—transforming them into mysterious beings suspended between vegetal and primal organisms. Though they carry the insignia of palm fronds, their surfaces and at times their shape suggest a strained familiarity. They are, in fact, firmly an unknown species. In a stunning reversal of the ponderousness of her fibre sculptures, which used gravity to advantage, Mukherjee’s Palmscapes appear not to wrestle with gravity at all; they are assertive in the allusion of being almost weightless. Marvelously engineered, Palmscape IX has furtive anatomy balancing precariously on the turn of a leaf.