In 15th century Japan, a shattered Chinese tea bowl in the palace of a Japanese king inspired Japanese craftsmen to look for more aesthetic means of repair. Some even began to deliberately smash valuable pottery to find a new technique. Bits of these shards made their way to Goa through the sea trade route. Years later, these shards were discovered by a local fisherman, and stitched with black Joinery, a technique he knew from years of stitching boats with tar. Eventually, the pot started to distort due to Goa’s hot climate.

Diptej’s sculptures at The Story of Space were about the history of material. They were made from materials that link back to Portuguese colonialism in Goa. The concept of time, or constant change, tied the sculptures together. These sculptural objects were partial truths, always affected by the space they inhabited. Whether made of melting wax, drying shrubs, or melting tar— all the materials used in the sculptures were metaphorical representations of our own mortality.