Inquiring into the theatre of life, N.S. Harsha’s work honours humble, everyday moments and events as having profound consequence in the meaning of our lives, pushing beyond mimetic principles that estrange art from natural encounter. Neither wholly spiritual nor wholly scientific, his performative compositions render esoteric concepts with wit and whimsy, his expressions almost always satirical about the human experience. In this sculpture, Harsha is interested in the role time has played on an iconic subject like ‘mother and child’ in art history. While experimenting in his studio with a series of ‘shelf-life’ sculptures made out of steel carton boxes, he pursued the transcendental form to locate the essence of relationship in contemporary society, which is deeply entangled in consumerist and capitalist culture. At the same time, Harsha recognized an artistic opportunity to infuse human and animal behavioural qualities into industrial material such as steel, bringing us a multi-dimensional work that melds divine knowledge with modern materiality.

- Dipti Anand