Artist Monica Rani Rudhar makes dazzling large-scale earrings from terracotta to celebrate Indian heritage
Multidisciplinary artist Monica Rani Rudhar is turning lost and inherited heirlooms into monumental sculptures. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)
Monica Rani Rudhar didn't realise how precious her pair of small, gold, hoop earrings were until she lost them at a party.
Speaking in her brightly sunlight studio in Western Sydney, Rudhar explains she'd had them since birth — as per tradition in her dad's Indian culture.
Baby girls have their ears pierced and wear Indian-style golden hoops, gifted by a family member as a "kind of welcome into the family".
"They become these cultural markers, and they communicate, 'I'm Indian'," Rudhar says.
Losing the earrings reminded her just how significant they are.
"I was so devastated, I was distraught. I called my dad and I told him, 'I've lost them'."
The beloved hoops that adorn Rudhar's ears, inspiring the first replica pair fashioned from terracotta and gold lustre. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)
Rudhar went back to some of the places she'd been that night with a torch to hunt for them, to no avail.
But the following week, the colleague who'd held the party came up to her at work and opened his hand — revealing her glistening lost earrings.
"I was just like, 'How did you know that was mine?' And he was like, 'I don't know, I just felt like this belonged to you'.
"It felt like the earring knew how to get back to me somehow, it felt magical in a way. It's just the way that these objects are."
The experience was so powerful it sparked Rudhar's interest in making her own jewellery.
In her space at Parramatta Artists Studios in Granville, hang two gold, shimmering, embellished hoops about ten centimetres in diameter, just like the ones she wears in her ears, only made of glazed terracotta.
Three years on, this idea has up-scaled, into oversized, glistening, gold sculptures of heirloom jewellery.
Rudhar is one of seven leading Australian ceramics artists featured in the exhibition Kerameikos, referencing the ancient Athens potters' quarter. (Image: Jacquie Manning)
Most of them are one to two metres tall — large in size, to match their significance.
Two of these works are currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, featured in the Primavera: Young Australian Artists exhibition.
And just like the earrings she lost, then found, they have a tale to tell.
"They're shiny, they're big, they're these monumental pieces. There's a feeling of reverence … they're these ciphers, these objects that possess stories."
Rudhar's work Earrings That My Mother Kept for me, 2024 on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art for Primavera 2024. (Supplied: MCA & Zan Wimberley)
The connecting power of jewellery
Rudhar comes from a bloodline of goldsmiths. Her father, who is from Punjab, and many of her grandmother's family were goldsmiths, and her cousins still work in the jewellery industry.
"It wasn't intentional, but it's nice to reflect that I'm continuing this lineage," Rudhar says.
But it wasn't this family connection that first fuelled her interest in gold forms — more so the absence of it.
Growing up in South West Sydney, Rudhar didn't have much direct connection to family on either her Indian father or Romanian mother's sides.
There were dinners with family friends, and occasional visits from overseas aunties, but she says she didn't experience a natural immersion in culture.
"I had to make an effort to surround myself with those things," she says.
Jewellery is an important connection to family history and culture for Rudhar. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)
That included her parents' cooking, iconic Bollywood movies, and Indian clothes and jewellery.
"The way that jewellery becomes a part of your body and a part of your identity, you develop this association with this object — they're objects, but they're a part of you.
"Indian jewellery was really important because they were something that was in reach, that I could access to feel connected to my Indian heritage and culture."
Jewellery was steeped in meaning. But beyond her small hoops, Rudhar had little else.
While it is tradition to adorn a bride with gold, Rudhar says her mum had grown up in a very conservative town in Romania, and felt uncomfortable wearing ornate Indian gold jewellery. Her parents gave a lot of the bridal jewellery away.
As she grew older, Rudhar became determined to reclaim those lost pieces — by making them herself.
"I liked terracotta in that it had a lot of links to Indian crockery and homewares and ancient antiquities," says Rudhar, at work in her studio. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)
"Making the works, I felt like I was able to process and move through a lot of the emotions that I felt … I felt robbed, or I felt like these things have been taken away.
"I already felt so distant and far away from my Indian family, this [lost jewellery] was like another thing, another barrier."
Making jewellery is her way "of overcoming those barriers".
"So I decided to remake those [lost] pieces, but in a large scale, as a way to memorialise them."
"I generally start off sketching them, understanding the shapes that the earrings have and the type of style — just familiarising myself with the actual piece." (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)
It's helped Rudhar connect more strongly to her culture and identity.
"I felt like my ties and links to Romania and India were very fraught — with art, I feel like I was able to heal that link," she says.
"There were a lot of emotions that came to the surface. And I remember when I made my first work, about my family, about my grandmother, I couldn't even talk about it. I would choke up and I would start crying.
"I remember sitting at a cafe with my partner, and he would ask, 'What are you making for this show?' And I couldn't even talk about it.
"It's amazing how all these things that have actually just been suppressed were kind of rising to the surface.
"I do get emotional talking about certain stories because they're really special … these stories mean a lot to me."
Rudhar hopes her work inspires other South Asian artists to share their own experience — of being children of migrants, or feeling disconnected from their homeland. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)
Sculpting the ornate jewellery
Rudhar's striking supersized earrings take several weeks to make.
She begins by sketching an image of the jewellery, sometimes from a photo sent from an overseas family member.
There's often a lot of ornamentation in the Indian jewellery — bell-like and crescent shapes, motifs of flowers and teardrops, and different animals, like peacocks and elephants.
Art supplies and an up-scaled earring design in Rudhar's studio (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)
After observing and sketching the shapes, she scales up the drawings, creating large simplified segments, in a process similar to pattern making.
The shape is hand-built from clay. That's then fired, glazed and coated with a gold lustre. "I love gold, I love shiny things", she says.
Since her first prototype in 2021, terracotta clay has been the obvious choice of material to work with.
Rudhar tested glazes as she developed her process — "I remember thinking, is this going to work, is this going to look good? I'm not sure, but I felt like I was on the right track". (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)
"It's just so earthy. And it … reminds me of a lot of Indian pots and water jugs, cups that are given out by chai wallahs in India.
"I really liked that it was a fragile material, and that if you don't look after it, it can break and shatter — I also like that it could last forever as well."
Rudhar likens terracotta treasures to oral histories: if they're not passed on, they cease to exist.
"[But] if you look after them … they'll hang around for a long time."
"Initially, it felt like a grief … now, it feels more celebratory," says Rudhar about reconnecting with family histories and stories through her art. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)
Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists runs until January 27, 2025 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney.
Rudhar's work also features in the Kerameikos exhibition at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney, until August 3, 2025.