Boshudhara Mukherjee's meditative tapestries

In her new solo, the artist takes her engagement with weaving and crocheting to a larger, more ambitious scale

- Anindo Sen

Boshudhara's 'The View', 2025, fabric, thread, cotton lace.

The title of Boshudhara Mukherjee's ongoing solo exhibition, Happenstance, at TARQ gallery in Mumbai, is a portmanteau of the words, "happening" and "circumstance".

It alludes to random occurrences which, irrespective of whether they are serendipitous or unfortunate, carry the potential to profoundly inform our lives.

"The artist believes that the circumstances in which her work comes to be is an organic and instinctive process," states the accompanying gallery note.

This is 42-year-old Boshudhara's third solo with the gallery in 10 years. Clearly, she has outgrown the earliest phase of primarily creating shredded-and-woven canvases, as seen in the first solo at TARQ in 2016. An analysis spanning the past and current exhibitions suggests not quantum leaps or radical turns but a gradual evolution elicited by reflection. The works exhibited in this show are the outcome of layered dialogues between her past and present, and experimentation with material and colour.

While she now uses cotton cloth from everyday fabrics as her foundation; in some of her works, she has added crocheting, open lace patterns, and even extruded nets used for packaging vegetables. Her hybrid creations now feel more like “soft sculptures” than “woven paintings” which they came across as earlier. Some of her earlier shredded canvases also make a low-key comeback, reused and embedded in some of her current larger works.