My practice as a ceramic artist and researcher is shaped by an ongoing dialogue between material, memory, and environment. Working at the intersection of contemporary ceramics, cultural heritage, and ecological responsibility, I explore how traditional craft knowledge and sustainable methodologies can illuminate one another. My installation, Faces of Flame, and the broader body of work surrounding it are grounded in the conviction that materials, especially those cast aside as waste, carry narratives that are both culturally and environmentally significant.
Growing up in Kolkata and later training at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, I developed a practice that is equally informed by fine-art enquiry and historical awareness. My current research at Oxford as a DPhil researcher in Archaeology further deepens this trajectory, positioning ceramics not simply as objects but as vessels of cultural continuity, ritual value, and environmental consciousness. My encounters with workshops and kiln sites in India, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam have revealed to me how ceramic traditions evolve through intimate relationships with place: local clays, communal firing practices, inherited knowledge systems, and the cyclic rhythms of labour and landscape. These practices echo broader Indic worldviews that regard material processes as embedded within cosmological, social, and ecological frameworks.
Within this context, sustainability in my work is not only an environmental choice but a cultural one. The use of pallet wood, agricultural by-products, and discarded organic matter to fuel my firings reflects a commitment to paryāvaraṇadharma, a responsibility to maintain balance between human action and the natural world. This approach resonates with South Asian craft lineages, in which resourcefulness, reverence for materials, and the cyclical use of resources are long-standing principles. By reimagining waste as a generative force, I seek to foreground these values within contemporary ceramic discourse.
Faces of Flame emerges from my study of wood-firing traditions and the dynamic behaviour of flames within single-chamber kilns. Each piece records the traces of fire, ash, and atmospheric flux, marks that function like inscriptions of process, place, and time. These surfaces, created through methods that draw on both kiln archaeology and inherited craft knowledge, embody a dialogue between control and surrender, continuity and adaptation. For me, these works serve as contemplative objects, inviting viewers to reflect on transformation, impermanence, and the interconnectedness of elemental force, ideas that also underpin many strands of Hindu thought.
