The Philosophy of Mud

 

For me, mud is not a neutral material. It carries the energy of the place it comes from.

Mud picked from a place of worship will not feel the same as mud picked from a place of grief. Mud from a riverbank, a courtyard, a forest, a battlefield, a place of displacement, or a site of violence will all carry different memory. Some earth can feel pristine, some wounded, some sacred, some heavy. This is why picking mud is not a random act for me. It is a careful, almost ritualistic process.

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I am intrigued by mud because it holds history, geography and philosophy within it. It is walked upon, built with, worshipped, ignored, eaten by some cultures, and returned to by all bodies eventually.

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When I arrived at RCA and felt overwhelmed by the abundance of art, materials, and experiments around me, mud became my way of going back to the most basic — but also the most powerful.

Mud has always lived inside indigenous and tribal art practices in India, especially in the regions I come from and work around — Jharkhand, Bihar, and the larger eastern Indian landscape.

In traditions such as Sohrai and Khovar, women artists have worked with earth, mud walls, natural pigments, fingers, twigs, cloth, combs, and inherited visual memory for generations. These practices are not merely decorative. They carry ecology, ritual, gendered labour, ancestral knowledge, and a deep understanding of material and surface.

By using mud, I am trying to bring this indigenous material intelligence into the contemporary art spectrum. I am interested in asking why some practices are called “folk” or “craft”, while others are allowed to sit comfortably inside galleries as “contemporary art”.

Mud becomes social and political for me because it challenges hierarchy. It questions who gets called an artist, whose material is considered serious, whose knowledge is archived, and whose practice remains outside the institutional frame.

In my work, mud is not nostalgia. It is not a return to the past. It is a living material that can stand inside contemporary art with dignity

Mud is one of the most available materials on earth, yet it is never the same everywhere. Technically, mud can contain clay, silt, sand, organic matter, iron oxides, manganese, calcium carbonate, silica, alumina, and many other minerals depending on the geography it comes from.

This is what makes it so fascinating. One mud may crack. Another may stain. One may behave like powder, another like skin. Some muds absorb water quickly, some resist binding, some dry pale, some darken, some become grainy, some become smooth and almost velvety. Its particle size, plasticity, porosity, mineral composition, and moisture retention all affect how it behaves on canvas.

My research has been very instinctive and experimental. I mixed mud with water, glue, oil, and different natural combinations, while trying to keep the whole process synthetic-free. I was not trying to turn mud into factory-made paint. I was trying to understand how far mud can travel as colour, body, texture, and surface without losing its own character.

This has opened a huge curiosity in me. I now want to collect mud from different geographies across the world and study how each place behaves differently on canvas. I want to see what happens when mud from one land meets a surface in another land. I want to understand how earth remembers, resists, blends, breaks, and transforms.

Mud excites me because it is humble but not simple.
It is basic but not weak.
It is sustainable, alive, unpredictable, and full of energy.