Spain, 2016: It was a Saturday morning when local Spanish friends dragged me to the “largest flea-market of the year” in Barcelona. In a central location of the chaos, I spotted three huge mountains of dolls, specifically Barbie dolls, enough to fill up a basketball court. I asked my potter friend, Alberto Bustos, to tell the seller what I wanted. The man, however, gave me a dirty look and turned away. I asked Alberto what he’d told him. He replied, “I told him this Indian man does not want good quality Barbie dolls. He is going to tear up their clothes, cut off their hair, and do something with them.”
No wonder the man freaked out. So, I requested Alberto to tell him that I am a ceramic artist and want to do such ‘horrors’ only so that I could make plaster of Paris moulds of the dolls to create sculptural figurines in clay. The problem solved, I carried the collection of dismembered dolls to India. (Never mind what my bag looked like in the X-ray machines at the airports!)
