The Secret Life of the Mind

Shweta Shiware discovers the brilliance of sculptor Sakshi Gupta's "grotesque and seductive" new metalworks.

- 

Sakshi Gupta's 89-by-117-meh sculpture, Spaces of Being, is a terrific decoy, evoking human vulnerability, but also latent strength. Walk round the plain façade made of scrap, and there stands carved in a coop a claustrophobic parade of eyeless chickens stacked one above the other, brooding over eggs for hatching, peering, napping, meddling, coexisting.

Look closer, and there's a pheasant sitting at the base, its long wisps of curvilinear metal wings flapping within the confines of the cage. Here, Gupta sees the human spirit in lepidoptera to reflect on questions such as: What is freedom.