Mukherjee, who produced all of this work over a four-decade career, was born in Mumbai in 1949. Her mother, Leela, was a sculptor; her father, Benode Behari, a mural painter and an influencer in the history of Indian modernism. He studied painting at the university at Santiniketan, in West Bengal, and went on to teach there, counting among his students another important figure, K.G. Subramanyan, who later mentored the budding artist.

The early years Mukherjee spent at Santiniketan, with its famous “tree schooling” style (classes were held outdoors) and a curriculum giving equal weight to art, natural science and traditional Indian culture, had lasting effect. Still, when at 16 she decided to go to art school, she opted for the progressive urban Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda (now Vadodara), where Subramanyan was on the faculty.

With his cosmopolitan interests — Indian folk art, African sculpture, up-to-the-minute European painting — he was a stimulating guide. And it was while she was taking part in the school’s annual student crafts fair that she first tried weaving wall hangings from natural fibers, found that satisfying, and kept doing it, using traditional artisan materials and techniques to make full-on sculptures of a kind no one had ever seen.

It was a bravely idiosyncratic choice, as was her career-long insistence that she wasn’t making folk art, or design, or fiber art, or female art. She was using a pre-modern medium to make up-to-date art, period. Again, she was lucky to have the support of Subramanyan (1924-2016), who was particularly partial to oddball media. (His uncategorizeable ceramic reliefs were included in the 2017 edition of Documenta.)