"Ceramics happened to me. It's not something I chose. Existence decided, and I took it."
There are artists who spend years in pursuit of a medium, and then there are those that seem to be found by it, Ruby Jhunjhunwala being one of them. A chance meeting at a yoga class in 1971 with ceramic educator Daniel Rhodes led her to Alfred University, and from there to six months of training under Sardar Gurcharan Singh, the Padma Shri-awarded pioneer of studio pottery in India. All of this, before marriage,motherhood, and years in Kolkata where she temporarily redirected her energy in other, less laborious art forms. When she returned to Pune and rebuilt her practice from near-scratch, starting with bricks and a terracotta kiln in a garage, she brought with her one lesson from her academic years that has never left her work: if a piece looks beautiful in the glazing stage before the colour, fire, or the mineral compounds have transformed into glass—it will come out beautiful. She repeats this to her team today as both technical instruction and philosophy: don't glaze erratically. Feel whether the tonal balance is right, whether the texture is working with the form or against it. Trust what you see before you can fully see it.
The body of work Ruby has produced over five decades resists easy categorisation because her attention moves between materials with unusual fluency. Notes to Myself is among her most intimate series. Its starting point was Hugh Prather's book of the same name. It contained daily meditations, each occupying a single page which she had carried in her memory for years before finding the right way to respond to it. The response, when it came, was structured into individual slips of clay and paper, assembled like pages, each one the scale and proportion of something you might hold in one hand and read. The technical challenge was thinness. Working with paper had pushed her to ask how thin clay could be made while still surviving the stresses of drying and firing with the uneven walls warp. Thin clay is more vulnerable to thermal shock between the bisque and glaze firings; a piece that looks stable before the kiln can crack or collapse inside it. On some slips, she writes. On most, she leaves the surface blank which is a deliberate restraint. Too much of the maker's inner life, she reasoned, crowds out the owner's.
Revival came from during a visit to ceramicist Anupam's studio in Lucknow, where she spent a few hours making her own paper using fabric scraps and, noticing that ants had excavated sand nearby. She gathered that too and pressed it into the sheets. The resulting paper carries actual soil within its surface: matter with its own prior life, incorporated as physical fact. The series takes its name seriously, it was made at a moment when she was returning, again, to paper as a primary medium, and the act of making the material from the ground up was inseparable from the work's meaning.
Likewise, the Cityscape series arrived, out of a process designed to produce something else entirely. Ruby had been commissioned to make a twelve by twenty feet architectural mural, requiring thick tiles that could survive transport and installation. When making tiles of this scale, excess clay must be scooped from the back of each one to reduce weight. The excavated irregular pieces, bearing the pressure marks of the scooping tool were headed for recycling when she looked at them and stopped. The forms suggested buildings under structural stress. This was during COVID, when cities had emptied and the imagery of collapse was everywhere. She had her assistant Shiv Shankar wrap and preserve the fragments rather than return them to the clay body. The Cityscape works are built entirely from these unintended forms: nothing was designed toward the final result, everything was recognised within the process. The conceptual weight of the series of the city folding in on itself was latent in the material. In pieces such as these, the work becomes reflective, but whether that reflection carries a sense of urgency remains open.
The Muthi series began with a lucky accident of sorts, while being heavily centred around community-facing participation built from the impressions of other people's hands. The series is rooted in an experience close to home, with Jhunjhunwala’s grandson who was born with Down syndrome in 2016, and part of his early physiotherapy involved pressing clay open to build muscle strength. The impressions his hands left were beautiful. From this came a series of workshops in which every participant pressed a fistful of clay and left it with their name. The muthis that line her studio walls are a collective record of a lot of happy faces.
Ruby's collaborative practice is where some of her most recent projects have happened.Her first major collaboration was with artist Shraddha Borawake, and it changed how she understood the installation potential of ceramic work. Borawake came into the studio, picked up ceramic tiles at random, and arranged them in a way Ruby would never have arrived at herself. At the time, ceramic murals were not widely understood as objects that could be hung and read like paintings; this encounter had the artist thinking seriously about how ceramic work could be made easier to install and more flexible in how it occupied a space.
The collaboration deepened when Borawake brought a photograph of a Maharashtrian woman dusting a godhadi—the traditional quilt made from old saris, stitched together and passed from mother to daughter. Ruby made a godhadi in clay. The collaboration produced Windows in 2016 and Her Within and Without the following year, the latter shown at MonaLisa Art Gallery, Pune.
The Woven Together installation at Juneja Art Gallery in Jaipur in 2018 happened when Jhunjhunwala reached out to potters internationally and asked each one to contribute a four-by-four clay swatch. What arrived were fragments made in studios across the world, carrying different clay bodies, and cultural registers of what a ceramic surface should be. Assembling them took four to five months. The resulting installation incorporated a dance performance by Rishikesh Pawar, a choreographer who works with Parkinson's patients.
“We hear each other, I give her space, and she gives me space to create” is Ruby’s take on why her ongoing collaboration with printmaker Snehal Goyal has produced some of her most sustained shared work. Snehal Goyal, works with a minimalism that sits in contrast to Ruby's layering seamlessly. Their connection began through paper, and has expanded into large-scale projects where both tier art forms have intersected to become a niche in itself.
Goyal handled the photographic and visual framing of their joint works while Ruby drove the installation decisions. The contrast was generative, in the sense that neither artist absorbed the other's instincts, and the resulting work carries the tension between them visibly. They have shown together in India and internationally, and the collaboration continues.
Rather than merging into a single style, their practices remain distinct by responding to, and at times even resisting, each other. In works like Confluence and subsequent exhibitions, this exchange is rooted in layered and responsive processes that bring together clay, paper, and organic textures. At spaces like Art & Soul Gallery, these material dialogues unfold within the gallery space, while at the Shanghai International Paper Art Biennale, they extend into immersive, installation-based forms.
On AI, she is straightforward: “In my house, I would still like a hand-painted or hand-made work, there is quite a bit of resistance there, when it comes to AI”. She deems it useful for drafting an artist statement, not relevant to the work itself. What she makes is too rooted in physical response, in what happens when a material pushes back, for a generative tool to have much purchase on it.
Ruby describes her relationship to clay now as one of chosen distance rather than dependence. She has worked with wood firing, gas, electric, soda, and raku, each technique producing different surface effects and requiring different handling of the clay body, and she considers that accumulated technical knowledge to be transferable to any material. Crochet and weaving entered her practice when younger interns noticed her knitting between studio sessions and asked why those skills weren't in the work. She had no satisfying answer, and began bringing them in. Metal is coming next.
She is planning a body of nine or ten large works, and is interested in public installations within hospitals, community spaces, where art can be encountered outside the gallery context. The studio itself runs with a small team, people from the surrounding farmland who have learned the process alongside her over time, rather than coming in as formally trained artisans, keeping the practice rooted in making, learning, and continuity.