Hand craft

Stone is the oldest witness we know; it has stood in silence as civilisations rose and fell. A material often associated with endurance, it becomes supple and fluid in the hands of sculptors. This was evident at StoneX India’s refinery at Kishangarh in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district recently, where 10 artists reimagined marble as a medium that could be chiselled and coaxed into a desired form.

Mumbai-based Sudarshan Shetty (64), one of India’s leading artists, says he is drawn to stone because of its inherent paradox. “Stone is often seen as eternal, yet even it carries the marks of time: weathered edges, soft erosions, hidden fractures. Within the weight of its seeming permanence lies the quiet truth of all things ephemeral,” he says. Shetty’s ‘Interred Umbrella’, made of Turkish marble, is “a meditation on mortality and impermanence”. When an everyday object is carved in stone, Shetty says, its familiar fragility is transformed. “What was once ordinary acquires a new gravity, as if time has been slowed down and what is perhaps simple and fleeting has been given the dignity of monument,” he adds.

Shetty believes that to be able to master something, one has to play out one’s own vulnerabilities and be open to the possibilities of human failure. Each piece of stone, he underlines, must hold the history of its own making over centuries. “My role, to begin with, is to enter a dialogue with it and insert, even in a small way, something of my own life into what it longs to become,” he adds.

In his sculpture ‘Impossible Stairway’, Delhi-based Gigi Scaria (52) turns Cappadocia marble into a surreal commentary on cities and alienation. “I don’t think of stone just as a permanent material. Cities themselves are built from stone, cement, concrete — materials we consider enduring. But, for me, any material, whether hard or soft, can reflect the concerns of its time. Stone too erodes, shapes itself over centuries, and arrives in the form we encounter today,” says Scaria.

“Hierarchy comes not from the material itself but from the way it is placed. It is like language: you can use it to write poetry that resists authority, or you can use it to codify laws that control society. Language can liberate, but it can also suppress. Stone too has this dual potential; it can be moulded by its user, shaped to reflect the time in which we live,” he says.

Talking about his sculpture, ‘The Way of the Wind’ (Pantheon marble), which explores textures reminiscent of canyons carved by centuries of erosion, Hyderabad-based Harsha Durugadda (36) says: “Stone changes when people touch it. That interaction is what keeps sculpture alive. If you look at our architecture… people might have touched a pillar over several centuries, giving it a sheen that the rest of the pillars do not have.”

For Bathinda-born Harmeet Rattan (38), marble becomes a critique of the “modern obsession with home ownership”. His ‘Dream House’, a tower of cloud hewn from Greek stone, Thassos Novelato, showcases the conflict between aspiration and reality. “In ‘Dream House’, the choice of white stone was very intentional,” says Rattan. “Stone carries permanence. It endures — like monuments of the ancient past that still stand as markers of human ambition. But here, I carved it into the form of a cloud, something transient, light, intangible. That tension — between what is solid and what can never be held — was crucial to me.”

Rattan says that for the middle class, a house is deeply desired, invested in, but it’s also fragile, precarious, sometimes always just out of reach. “By translating the softness of a cloud into the hardness of stone, I wanted to make that paradox visible — the dream as both material and immaterial.” The work’s structure layers this narrative.

Pune-based Yogesh Ramkrishna (34) takes satire as his entry point. His work ‘Shikhara’ transforms marble into a hammer, whose head fuses a mosque dome and a temple spire. “The piece becomes a point of investigation around how seats of power use religion as a tool to regain or maintain dominance,” he says.

Mumbai-based Teja Gavankar’s ‘Khora’ draws from Plato’s concept of an intermediate space where forms become reality. In her work, which uses Lasa Covelano marble, geometric spheres fracture rigidity into movement. “‘Khora’ is about in-betweenness and non-dualism, where something hard becomes fluid by breaking into smaller parts. It shows how becoming is never a fixed state; it is always about transition.”

Shanthamani Muddaiah’s ‘Bloom’ translates Bengaluru’s floral legacy and weaving traditions into Pantheon marble. R Magesh’s ‘The Monarch’ restrains the raw power of a horse within Grigio Bronze Amani marble. Shaik Azgharali’s ‘Cotton’ turns Carrara marble into fragile bolls that read as softness against solidity. Chandrashekar Koteshwar’s ‘Hidden Gem on Museum Steps’ stages satire in Statuario marble, a stone historically reserved for monuments and temples.

Together, these works reposition stone as a medium alive with contradictions. As Sushant Pathak of StoneX Global notes: “Each encounter was… a doorway into the soul of the artist and the silent wisdom of stone. Together, they revealed that stone is not merely material, but a living presence.”

A coffee-table book that situates these artists’ work in a dialogue with global pioneers such as Sebastian Errazuriz, Nicolas Bertoux, Cynthia Sah, Alex Seton, and Kota Kinutani was also launched.

— The writer is a Delhi-based contributor