The recently-concluded sculpture exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts featured five artists, of whom only Uma Roy Chowdhury is self-taught. The remaining four young men were trained either at the Government College of Art & Craft or at Rabindra Bharati University. They used diverse material, such as terracotta, ceramic, bronze and fibreglass, to give shape to their creations.

Of the participants, Prasun Ghosh is a well-known sculptor, who creates ceramic forms that resemble a vase, but manages to defamiliarize them. He uses sanitaryware — Indian-style pans — because he likes its shape, and not in a gimmicky sort of way.

Roy Chowdhury is the only woman among the participants and creates the female form divine, naturalistic fashion (picture). But the epidermis of her Eve is alive with the low-relief depictions of various vignettes that resemble some organic growth such as creepers which have grown all over her curvaceous body and bosom. The woman looks as if her body is part of the creative process of nature.

Although Roy Chowdhury did not go to any art school, she was, according to the catalogue, trained by a famous sculptor in Kassel, Germany. This is quite evident from the ease with which she gave shape to the female forms on display in either fibreglass or bronze. The power of her imagination is quite clear from the way in which she presents the image of a Durga visage being created by the hands of an artisan. One wonders how the face managed to overcome the gravitational pull. In Nature Orphaned, a tiny deer seeks refuge in a heartwarming image. The heads of stags with many-branched symbolic antlers and gleaming eyes (actually marbles) are presented as close to nature as possible.

If Roy Chowdhury excels in realistic depiction with equal facility she can break the female form and put the pieces together to create an image of moksha. Roy Chowdhury displayed a small body of work but she has already established her credentials as a sculptor of excellence.

Rathin Dey uses terracotta to create rather clumsy shapes that resemble crustaceans in coition, or perhaps some strange fruit like the rambutan.

Architectural forms in miniature, with ridges and recesses come alive in Debajit Chakraborty’s ceramic creations. With their deep shafts these resemble the step wells of Gujarat.

Of these sculptors the only one with a grim sense of humour is Soumen Das, who creates what may at first look like familiar forms like an iron or a mosquito-retardant coil. The iron turns out to be a woman with a beast resting on her supine body, Rosseau-style, and the mosquito coil is actually a depiction of an exotic tantric rite. Similarly, horror is writ large on either end of the telephone receiver. They are actually faces.