Unearthed

About the Exhibition

Unearthed is an exhibition that celebrates the expressive power of ceramics as a medium for personal reflection and collective storytelling. It presents clay as a vessel for narrative, transformation, and emotional excavation.

The exhibition explores the many dimensions of being unearthed. For some artists, this unearthing is emotional, involving the surfacing of memory, trauma, or healing. For others, it is symbolic or somatic, a return to the body, the earth, and the rituals of touch.

Each artist approaches clay as an extension of self, drawing parallels between its responsive, mutable nature and their own lived experiences. In doing so, they reflect on identity, home, ecology, and impermanence. These themes emerge gently but insistently through their work. The material holds memory. It responds to the hand. It bears the mark of time. Through these shared processes, the exhibition invites viewers into a quiet and resonant dialogue between artist and earth.

As one of the oldest creative practices in human history, ceramics links us to ancient ways of making while continuing to evolve in strikingly contemporary forms. Unearthed honours this legacy and extends it. It opens space for reflection on form, feeling, process, and presence.

Artist Statements

Aditi Kashyap | Becoming

Aditi’s work bridges the forms of trees and bodies, evoking a forgotten rhythm of living in harmony with the natural world. Her pieces resemble archaeological artefacts, shaped by emotion and time. Drawing from her life in Goa, her work speaks of women becoming trees, of returning to slowness, and of listening to the land.

Avani Tanya | To The Source

Avani’s unglazed ceramic forms are inspired by fluvial terrains and the natural erosion of landscapes. The textures in her work hint at things carried forward, including memory, residue, sediment, and loss. These works become quiet carriers of time, encouraging viewers to pause and trace the movement of what remains.

Khushboo Madnani

Khushboo’s series is a deep emotional excavation. Her forms follow an inward spiral, from unformed emotion to fluid movement to eventual harmony. Each piece reflects the chaos and grace of emotional life, akin to an unscripted dance. The repetitive gestures in her clay work echo the meditative spinning of the dervish, centering, grounding, and expanding the self.

Nimmy Joshi | Ice Age x

Nimmy’s ceramics respond to the ecological and emotional landscape of Goa, her adopted home. For her, the land is both a muse and a mirror. Ice Age x captures the impermanence of beauty and the surreal blend of memory and reality. Her forms feel like fleeting impressions, the mark of something already vanishing, like sand slipping through fingers.

Ragini Deshpande | Verses of the Heart

Ragini’s mixed media works are sculpted from ceramics, thread, wood, glass, and metal. Each heart form she creates is a vessel of feeling, containing heartbreak, longing, compassion, greed, malice, and above all, love. These delicate yet grounded pieces invite introspection on the fragile, layered, and impermanent nature of human connection.

Tanushree Singh | Memory

Tanushree’s porcelain sculptures reflect on the body’s capacity to remember. Just as clay records the touch and movement of its maker, the human body holds trauma, sensation, and memory in form. Her work stands at the intersection of mental health, anatomy, and nature. Each piece is shaped by intuition and a deep trust in material process.

Exhibition Flow and Experience

Throughout the two-week exhibition, Unearthed extended beyond the gallery and into the community with a range of hands-on and educational events. More than 300 school students from across Goa participated in interactive sessions designed to bring clay closer to the public.

Workshops included

• Obvara Firing with Khushboo Madnani
• Raku Firing with Clayton D’Souza from Mud Skippers Studio
• The Pot and I: Self-Portrait in Clay, facilitated by Aditi Kashyap and Shailee Mehta of Baadalghar

Students explored the tactile, expressive, and scientific aspects of ceramics, engaging with the medium not only as an art form but as a bridge between memory, culture, and ecology.

On the final day of the exhibition, the Clay Bazaar transformed the Museum of Goa into a vibrant public space celebrating ceramic practice. Featuring ten independent ceramists from across the state, the bazaar invited visitors to experience and purchase ceramics ranging from functional ware to sculptural pieces. The event marked a celebratory close to the exhibition and further anchored the role of clay in everyday life and public imagination.

Acknowledgements

Curated and supported by the Museum of Goa and its extended arts community, Unearthed was made possible through the collaboration of artists, facilitators, and the enthusiasm of its many visitors.

Special thanks to

• Participating artists
• Workshop facilitators
• CAS (Children’s Art Studio)
• The Clay Bazaar contributors
• Volunteers and staff