This small gallery at Mattancherry is replete with clay forms — sitting still, some rounded, others sharp and abstract — carrying traces of the hands that once shaped them decades ago.
The exhibition, ‘Whispering Clay — Celebrating life in Ceramics’ at OED Gallery, is a fitting retrospective of Vimoo Sanghvi’s artistic oeuvre.
Sanghvi is one of the stalwarts who laid the foundation for the Indian Studio Pottery movement, which made pottery an integral part of indigenous Indian fine art.
The exhibition showcases works of Sanghvi, an artist who spent her life extensively on ceramic practice, spanning over three decades from the 1960s to the late 1990s, a period when pottery was largely associated with ‘handicraft’. Curated by Kristine Michael and facilitated by Prakriti Foundation, this is the first time Sanghvi’s works are being shown in Kerala.
Born in Ahmedabad in 1920, Sanghvi took her passion for ceramics seriously in the 1960s. She shifted steadily between function and sculpture, creating vessels, abstract forms and later figurative works. She experimented boldly with different textures and often techniques far ahead of her contemporaries. Her walk through pottery was experimental, tactile and intensely personal, moulded by years of teaching and hushed observation rather than public recognition.
Kristine resisted turning the exhibition into just an archival display. “Many of her works were not dated, so the priority began on tracing her artistic revolution. I was fascinated by Sanghvi’s life and work as she was relatively unknown outside of Bombay. I wanted to share her vibrancy of passion with the medium,” she says.
Kristine first encountered Sanghvi in the 1990s. By that time, the artist had stopped working on pottery. “She was living surrounded by her early work,” Kristine recalls.
“There was a calm to her relationship with the medium.” That seclusion is echoed in the exhibition’s title, ‘Whispering Clay’. The clay was allowed to subsist on its own terms. “No one was making this kind of work in the early 1960s in India,” she adds. “Sanghvi took ceramics into abstracts and sculptural territory when it was only seen as solely for utilitarian purposes.”
The decision to exhibit the work emerged between Prakriti Foundation and Kristine, when they discovered that over 600 ceramic works were with Sanghvi’s family. “It felt important that the work enter a public space and cultural conversation rather than be confined to a private space,” says her grandson Raaj Sanghvi.
Many of her works displayed at the exhibition come from the home she lived in.
“In one interview, she mentioned that one of these figures reminded her of her father and of people she had known. That makes the series especially meaningful. In a way, these works connect me to ancestors I never met.
They feel more intimate and tactile than photographs, as though I’m seeing how she remembered them,” Raaj explains.
For the Prakriti Foundation, which facilitated the exhibition, bringing Sanghvi’s work to Kochi during the Biennale was an easy decision.
“There is an audience who is willing to look and spend time,” says Ranvir Shah, founder and trustee of the foundation. “The Biennale creates receptiveness. People arrive with a curious mind that allows an artist like Sanghvi to be rediscovered.”
After Vimoo’s passing in 2017, boxes of photographs, old exhibition catalogues, price lists and writings revealed an expansive career. The importance of Sanghvi’s journey is not merely confined to what she moulded from the clay.
Teaching at institutions like Sophia College and Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay, she was a part of a generation that amplified and moulded the language of Indian modernism. Long before ceramics gained institutional recognition, her creations explored abstraction, cubist influences and figurative expressions in clay.
Later on, her work began drawing openly from Indian rituals and domestic forms — familiar shapes reimagined.
Today, these works feel remarkably contemporary, echoing the present on materials imprinted with past memories.