Rina Banerjee is known for her eclectic sculptures, watercolour paintings and delicate drawings that reflect her background, incorporating South Asian and Western cultural and material influences. Her practice often incorporates materials from various traditions. Her works on paper are inspired by ancient Asian art, where colourful patterns and grotesque, monstrous figures intertwine and float in an extraordinarily curious universe. The lines between male and female, human and divine are blurred, rendering strong depictions of our contemporary world through the artist’s eyes.
Banerjee’s titles are often long and poetic, seeming to come from ancient texts, but the words are the artist’s own. This painting's full title is: In turmeric Yellow, another world apart from ours, bathed in humans as resources, natural riches seated in natures warm throne, golden and delicious, encrusted in sugary plants and rambunctious animals waited, watched when small factories tired in the business of making money could not make me a mango (2020).
It depicts a female figure, uncomfortably contorted in the scene, holding a monkey. They both stare out at the viewer making it apparent that the viewer is intruding upon the scene and disrupting the natural environment. Inspired by ancient South Asian art, the painting was specially selected as it builds upon the art-historical associations between South Asian art and the museum’s collections. The architectural sculptor and art teacher John Lockwood Kipling (1837–1911) attended art classes in Stoke before moving to India, where he taught at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art in Mumbai and the Mayo School of Industrial Arts in Lahore (today Pakistan’s National College of Arts). Kipling also helped to establish the Wonderland Art Pottery, which specialised in traditional South Asian arts and crafts, and a selection of the earthenware vessels made by the pottery were donated to The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent by Kipling’s son, the author Rudyard Kipling, in the early 20th century. This work is thus a significant addition to the development of the museum’s fine art collection, strengthening its holdings of artworks by important female South Asian artists.
