Either there is nothing perfect in nature or perhaps nature is perfect and our perception of it is synthetic. What matters the most is the artwork’s depth,” says ceramist Rahul Kumar. He doesn’t see a crack in a ceramic piece as a flaw: a dent is not an accident, and a fingerprint is not something to be just removed. They are imprints of moments, gestures and emotions that might otherwise disappear. In his ongoing exhibition, Marking Time: What Remains, Passes, and Returns, clay becomes a vessel for these fleeting traces.
Ochre-hued slabs greet the eye with their polished, almost soothing surfaces, until a sudden gash interrupts the smoothness. Elsewhere, a dense block bears the forceful imprint of a fist, its fingerprints and knuckle ridges frozen in time. Glazed surfaces collide with gritty, granular textures. The works are at once tactile and elusive, almost daring viewers to reach out and touch them. The exhibition examines humanity’s desire to hold on to what time inevitably takes away. “A grandmother’s sari, a friend’s letter—we put objects on a pedestal and elevate them to relics, trying to hold back instead of letting go,” says Kumar, also a curator and art journalist.
Clay is an apt metaphor for this contradiction. It can endure for centuries, as the terracotta shards of Harappa demonstrate, yet shatter with a careless fall. This tension between permanence and fragility runs through Kumar’s work. To him, clay also offers an unusual intimacy between maker and material. Unlike the brush between a painter and canvas or the chisel between a sculptor and stone, there is little separating the hand from clay. It brings together all five elements of nature and appeals to him at a spiritual level.
His fascination began in his late teens, during a visit to Delhi’s Janpath, where watching a potter transform a lump of clay into a curved form sparked a lasting interest. After starting out as a studio potter, Kumar eventually left a two-decade corporate career to pursue art. His early works explored utilitarian forms—teapots, dishes and containers—until a question prompted a shift: “Where am I being reflected in my pots?”
Since then, contradiction has become central to his practice. In the exhibition, clay converses with resin, cast iron and smokefired terracotta. Vivid glazes have given way to earthy hues, while the vessel form that once defined his work has disappeared altogether. What remains are ambiguous, metaphorical shapes marked by fissures and fractures. For Kumar, 49, imperfection is not a condition to be corrected but an artistic possibility.
He pushes this idea further by embracing what ceramic convention discourages. “Firing a block of clay or fusing different kinds of clay is bound to develop cracks. But the cracks are not welcome if they occur—it is an absolute desire to have them. If cracks surface in my process, they help my storytelling,” says the Fulbright scholar. His rebellion is not against physics but against the rules of the medium.
Intuition and serendipity shape the results. In Bound Earth, sandy layers of glazed stoneware and earthenware evoke the accumulation of memories. In Calendar Bound By Fire, molten metal meets clay calendars, the materials merging rather than shattering on impact. Other works borrow from the imagery of mummification, exploring the impulse to preserve what has already passed.
Words, too, leave their mark. Scribbles carved into flattened clay slabs, inspired partly by his journalistic pursuits, recur in the exhibition. “The idea was for it to not be readable,” he says. Once gibberish, these marks have evolved into letters Kumar writes to himself, encases in clay and leaves deliberately inaccessible. Only the final word remains exposed. “If you try to open it, the letter will crack and break. So no one will ever be able to read it,” he says.
Kumar describes his artistic pursuit as an attempt not to complexify but to complicate. The forms may look deceptively simple. “Anyone can take a block of clay and thump the fist into it.” The real work, however, lies in arriving at that simplicity. Citing Russian modernist Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, he reflects: “When learning a language, we try to make our words appear complex. But then comes the point of sieving out clutter and preserving the essence. What remains is minimal yet evocative.”
Over two decades, ceramist Jyotsana Bhatt, sculptor Himmat Shah and his mentor PR Daroz have shaped his artistic sensibility. Yet inspiration can come from anywhere—a song, a building or an artwork steeped in metaphor. As he prepares to curate the upcoming Students’ Biennale, his practices as an artist, journalist, and curator continue to feed into one another. In the end, it is the smallest gestures that endure: a finger pressed into clay, a letter sealed away, a crack left untouched. In Kumar’s world, time may be impossible to hold, but its imprints can be made to last.
