Prabhavathi Meppayil forty nine fifty seven-06.30, 2022

Prabhavathi Meppayil was born into a family of goldsmiths in Bangalore, and that inheritance runs through her work at the level of material and method. Her new sculptures begin with the Achch: hand-beaten metal molds used by goldsmith families in the Bangalore district, passed within those families and rarely reproduced. Meppayil filled the molds' recesses with wax, lifted out the positives, and had them cast in bronze, first by lost-wax and later by sand casting, using the alloy ratio traditional to the trade. What was an instrument for making jewelry has become the work itself. The geometry Meppayil works with—stretched wire yielding a line, scooped pallaccio forms yielding a circle, rectangular Achch producing cubes—is found rather than composed. These are geometric forms, but they are irregular, hand-carved, sometimes strange in their proportions, and they resist being read as pure ones: they have been held, used, and shaped inside a specific social and cultural setting, and they carry a history of skill now close to disappearing as machines replace handmade jewelry.