The Open Studio / Aakansha Gupta
Aakansha Gupta
Basera
Six small rooms, each holding what the water left behind
Green settles on the roof like still water.
Below it the walls turn the brown of a riverbank after rain.
A mattress folds in on itself. A chair stands empty.
In one room a small child holds its face in both hands.
The light reaches only halfway into each arch.
Everything here has gone hard, as if the flood stopped and stayed.
The work
Aakansha Gupta builds a small house with six arched rooms in two rows. Each room holds one object: a folded mattress, a stack of bowls, a chair, a round basin and a small seated child. As a child in Kishanganj, Bihar, Gupta lived through a flood. Here she makes soft, easily ruined things in high-fired clay so that they become permanent. The glaze runs from pale green at the top to brown and ochre below. For Gupta, these colours carry the weight of mud and silt.
In the artist’s words
“My work looks at a childhood flood in Kishanganj, Bihar, through the eyes of a child. I use high-fired ceramic clay to make stiff, permanent forms of fragile things like toys, mattresses and suitcases, which water ruins. The clay gives permanency to the impermanent. The glaze colours are not decorative. They carry the weight of mud, silt and emotional gravity.”
- Theme
- Flood and childhood home
- Material
- Glazed ceramic
- Size
- 11.43 × 27.94 × 27.94 cm
- Year
- 2026
- Edition
- 1
- Framed
- No
- About the artist
- Visva Bharati University
- From
- KISHANGANJ
- Code
- RC-459
