Ceramicist Vimoo Sanghvi was a potter and a pathbreaker. One of India’s pioneering studio pottery artists, she often said that pottery “kept her alive”. But the reverse was equally true: a woman artist who strove to keep the art form pertinent at a time when the medium wasn’t as popular.
Trained in England and based in Bombay, where she exhibited extensively, her repertoire is little known. But a retrospective is now helping correct that gap. Whispering Clay: Celebrating a Life in Ceramics, her showcase that opened earlier this year in Mumbai, is travelling to Kochi, in time for the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The show is a fluid exposition of the master artist who worked with equal proficiency in throwing on the wheel, slip casting, carving and incising, and sculptural forms.
Vimoo Sanghvi at the wheel
Vimoo Sanghvi with one of her creations
Her ‘magnificent obsession’, as her son, journalist and writer Vir Sanghvi, recalls, was the story of a woman who pushed the boundaries of her time and of technical perfection. Vimoo experimented with scale, moved away from the pastels of western pottery to create earthy indigenous glazes, steered her British pedagogy to Indian silhouettes and shapes, and established her own unique repertoire at a time when the Progressive Art Movement was sweeping across Bombay.
An exhibition of Vimoo Sanghvi’s ceramics
Learning from the Modernists
The idea of pottery first fascinated Vimoo as a young mother living in south Bombay. The daughter of a wealthy Gujarati industrialist (born in 1920), she chose formal training in England at the Willesden Art School in the ’50s.
In the early ’60s, with an imported wheel and kiln that she set up a studio in Churchgate, Vimoo joined the modern arts movement of the time — watching the first contours of modernist painting in India being defined and seeking to do the same in her work. As her hands mastered clay, she moved to abstract expressionism, the Cubist style she observed among Bombay’s Progressive, and to forms that were not always utilitarian, influenced by her extensive travels in America and Europe. Kristine Micheal, curator of Whispering Clay, says that “she had a direct impact on the development of early studio pottery and ceramic art in Mumbai — be it with her contemporaries like Primula Pandit, as well as artisans like B.R. Pandit and Ismail Kumbhar”.
In this glazed terracotta piece, Vimoo shows her mastery in sculpting clay into a form that seems familiar and yet is unusual. She is also known for her mastery of multihued glazes — an alchemy where different oxides react in the kiln to produce the colour on the surface.
Her travels influenced her works. Inspired by Inca pottery, which combined sculptural forms with utilitarian spouts, Vimoo created playful, colourful pots.
Vimoo displays her skill at the wheel by making shapes that slightly break the perfect profile we expect in pottery shapes. So, every angle had a different shape.
A distinctly Indian aesthetic
Her work with traditional potters in Dharavi, who prepared her clay and fired her bisque pieces, and teaching stints at the JJ School of Art also influenced her decision to turn to India for inspiration. From her choice of colours to her motifs — sometimes religious or drawn from indigenous communities and vernacular landscape, such as rangoli designs and the Ajanta-style swans — she forged a path that was entirely her own.
Her last burst of creativity drew from the Arabian Sea that she saw daily, with elements of coral and textures based on the sea. In 1983, when she showcased her work at the Jehangir Art Gallery (incidentally, also where she held her first exhibition, in 1962), some of the pieces were a complete departure from her earlier work; almost sculptural, they combined built clay and wheel work.
Coiling is a technique where clay is made into long rope-like shapes and then stacked in layers allowing a potter to make sculptural forms.
From her last series By the Sea, this work is both complex and textured, inspired by her love for the ocean.
Glazed stoneware detail from Vimoo’s figurative period — the first studio potter in India with advanced skills to make these ceramics.
Stoneware that displays her mastery over form, glaze and technique.
Whispering Clay focuses on it all: her idea of beauty in the everyday, the influence of artists such as Japanese master potter Sōetsu Yanagi, her ability to bridge the East and the West. It is a lesson in experimentation and exploration for studio potters today.
Whispering Clay: Celebrating a Life in Ceramics — curated by Kristine Michael and facilitated by Ranvir Shah, Prakriti Foundation, and Raaj and Mallika Sanghvi — is on view at the OED Gallery, Mattancherry.
The writer is the founder-director of Eka Archiving Services.
While at the KMB
The sixth edition will showcase the works of 66 artists and collectives from 25 countries across 22 venues. Here are six the KMB team is excited about:
Gulam Mohammed Sheikh’s ‘Of Worlds Within Worlds’
Curated by Roobina Karode, the retrospective traces the painter’s artistic evolution, from early expressions of personal memory to monumental works that celebrate humanity and critically examine global and contemporary politics. The showcase will have more than a hundred selected works from the museum’s collection and loans from other institutions and private collections.
Presented by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, at Durbar Hall
Ibrahim Mahama’s ‘Parliament of Ghosts’
The large-scale installation explores Ghana’s colonial past, post-independence struggle and collective memory using a haunting assemblage of discarded objects such as jute sacks (once used to transport cocoa beans and charcoal, materials deeply tied to the country’s histories of labour and commodity dependence), scrapped school furniture, and faded railway sleepers. Also encompassing painting, sculpture, photography and film, it evokes the histories and memories of Ghana and its people.
Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama
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At Anand Warehouse
Marina Abramović’s performance lecture
The U.S.-based conceptual artist is all set to deliver a performance lecture that traces her artistic journey. But till she arrives in February, her presence will be marked at the KMB by her immersive projection Waterfall and a presentation by the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) Archive — which will highlight a collection of long-duration works and their corresponding documentation. Waterfall is a video installation depicting 108 Tibetan monks and nuns chanting the Heart Sutra, one of Buddhism’s most profound texts.
Marina Abramović
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First week of February, at Island Warehouse
Vivan Sundaram’s ‘Six Stations of a Life Pursued’
The installation debuted at the Sharjah Biennale in 2023 shortly after the artist’s death. It consists of sequences of photography-based works created in collaboration with artists such as Hilal Ahmed Khan, Anita Khemka, Imran Kokiloo, and Harish Khanna — focusing on the body, whether in isolation or in relationship to surroundings with specific political resonances.
Vivan Sundaram
At Cube Arts Space
Otobong Nkanga’s garden
The Belgium-based visual artist and tapestry maker examines the interconnectedness between humans and land within the contexts of resource extraction, colonisation, and migration. At the KMB, she will nurture an outdoor garden that mirrors the region’s biodiversity — native and non-native varieties of fruiting and flowering plants — and deep connection between the soil and cultural memory.
Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga
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At 111 Markaz & Cafe, Mattancherry
Island Mural Project
A new initiative by the Kochi Biennale Foundation, the Project brings art to public spaces in conversation with communities and regional histories. The first edition will have artists and collectives such as Aravani Art Project, Munir Kabani, Osheen Siva, Pradip Das, and Trespassers painting murals on select walls, creating spaces for connection, reflection, and shared belonging — inviting everyone to experience the neighbourhood in a new light.
Across Fort Kochi and Mattancherry
