4 Ceramics show brings 4 Golden Bridge artists to Fort Kochi

In 1971, two travellers showed up in Pondicherry with a bag of firebricks and a dream. Fifty-five years later, the pottery they built has shaped nearly every serious ceramicist in India. Now, four of those artists are bringing their work to Fort Kochi. And if you care about what hands can do with mud and fire, you should probably clear your calendar.

*She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire.* **The luminous heart of the Unknown is she, … ** ~ Lines from Sri Aurobindo Ghose’s epic poem Savitri describe the female godhead.

4 Ceramics opens on Feb. 6 at House of Vandy on Quiros Street, Fort Kochi. It will run from Feb. 6 to Feb. 23, 2026. It features four artists who trained at the legendary Golden Bridge Pottery in Pondicherry across different decades. Discover and experience how each found their own voice through clay.

4 Artists

Amrita Dhawan started working with clay in the early 1980s. She trained with Mansimran and Mary Singh at Delhi Blue Pottery before heading to Golden Bridge Pottery to study under Ray Meeker and Deborah Smith. For fifteen years, she ran a production pottery in Bangalore making wood-fired functional stoneware. Her work today moves between the functional and the sculptural. She has a permanent installation at the Fuping Pottery Art Village in China.

Ashwini Sunder represents a newer generation of Golden Bridge alumni. Her presence in this show bridges the older and emerging practitioners of studio ceramics in India.

Neha Kudcharkar brings a fresh perspective to the lineage. Like many Golden Bridge students, she carries the shared vocabulary of wood-fired stoneware while developing her own distinct aesthetic language. She is a visual and performing artist currently living in rural Maharashtra. Neha is a recipient of the Charles Wallace Scholarship.

Supriya Menon Meneghetti has been working with clay for over three decades. She began at Golden Bridge Pottery in 1994 and now heads the pottery studio at Maroma in Auroville. A Charles Wallace Award recipient, her ceramic work explores the feminine, time, and form. She has shown widely, from Faenza in Italy to Pondicherry. Her recent exhibition “From Darkness to Light” was a tribute to Golden Bridge co-founder Deborah Smith.

Why Golden Bridge Pottery is so important?

In 1971, there was almost no studio pottery tradition in South India. Ray Meeker and Deborah Smith set up a tiny coconut-leaf shed next to a railway line in Pondicherry. What started as a personal workspace grew into India’s most important ceramics school.

The title “Four Generations” is not just a catchy phrase. It tells you something real. These four women trained at Golden Bridge across different time periods. The pottery has been running its teaching program since 1983.

Each generation absorbed a slightly different version of the Golden Bridge experience. This depended on who was teaching, what visiting artists were around, and what the global ceramics scene looked like at the time.

Visiting Details

Exhibition: “4 Ceramics - Four Generations of Golden Bridge Pottery Students”

Artists: Amrita Dhawan, Ashwini Sunder, Neha Kudcharkar, Supriya Menon Meneghetti

Venue: House of Vandy, Quiros Street, Fort Kochi

If you are in Fort Kochi for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale season, you can see this show while you are there. It is quiet, grounded, and deeply rooted in decades of practice. The kind of show where you stand in front of a single piece and feel the weight of the hours that went into making it.

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Did you know? Between the Princess Street and Petercellie Street in Fort Kochi there was a tripod-like appliance called “Mukali”, for tying up offenders and whipping them.