In the village where Sushil Yadav grew up, houses were made of mud and straw. Families lived in them for many years. Then the rains came. The walls grew soft. One season a corner fell. A few seasons later the house had gone back into the field.
Sushil watched this happen again and again. “I saw mud houses being made from earth,” he says. “Slowly they changed with time. They broke down. Finally they became part of the same soil again.”
That picture became a question. What is left when a home is gone? For Sushil, the answer is not the building. “Memories, relationships, emotions, identity and a sense of belonging can remain within us.”
Sushil comes from a village in Kushinagar district in Uttar Pradesh. In 2025 he finished a BVA in Sculpture at Dr Shakuntala Misra National Rehabilitation University in Lucknow with a gold medal. Now he is in the final year of an MVA at the same university.
His main material is terracotta. “For me, clay is not just a material for making sculptures,” he says. “It is the language of my ideas.” What grows out of his coils are people who are also roots. Arms and legs twist into roots. Bodies lean on each other and hold each other up. They are not plant roots, he says. They stand for the ties we cannot see.
In Roots, Memories, Ruins, Reconstruction, human forms rise out of broken ground. Above them stands a frame of bamboo that is not finished. It is not meant to be. “The structure is incomplete on purpose,” Sushil says, “because I see rebuilding as something that goes on.”
In Entwined Roots, bodies and roots wind through each other inside rings of clay. You cannot tell where one person ends. The rings hold them together. They also hold them in.
The cracks stay
Clay does not always do what you want. It shrinks and cracks as it dries. It cracks again in the kiln. At first Sushil tried to fix every crack. Then something changed. In his film in Issue One, he tells us when the cracks stopped being mistakes.
A figure sits on an old tree stump, wrapped in roots. It is about how much we need nature. And how hard it is to stay close to it while everything around us changes.
Sushil still calls all of this an experiment. Next come bigger forms and new materials. He wants doors to open for “other young artists, especially those coming from villages and small towns.” And the thing every young artist needs most: “honest feedback.”
Read Issue One, with all eight films →
More about Sushil, and Sushil’s works in the catalogue →
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