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Industrial scrap gathered across seven Indian cities — assembled into figurative and animal works drawn from temple sculpture, ecological memory, and cultural history.
Rust is time made visible on metal. I am drawn to things that are returning — not broken, not abandoned, but going back.
Growing up across India — Kochi, Thrissur, Chennai, Palakkad, Guwahati, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore — he would return from walks with pockets full of metal scraps, rubber offcuts, fragments of wire. The practice of collection preceded the practice of sculpture by fifteen years.
The original material is never erased. The rust stays. The dilapidation is the point.
Mild steel, brass, copper, rubber, e-waste, natural fibres — materials already changed by use and weather. Pai does not clean them or make them new. He listens to what they already are.
Each work assembles in a single concentrated session Pai describes as sacred. He finishes by encountering the result as a stranger. The work exceeds the maker.
M.Des Industrial Design, IIT Guwahati (2018). B.Tech Mechanical Engineering, University of Calicut. The designer's material intelligence enters the sculptor's instinctive process.
"The idea builds slowly in some corner of my brain — and subconsciously I find the missing objects and materials, and sit once and create."
Waste is not a waste,
until you waste it.
From a preserved pearl-fishing village on the Arabian Gulf coast to India's living rooms.
2 exhibitions · 2021–2026A designer trained at IIT Guwahati is making sculptures from what the street throws away — and the results have reached an international festival in the UAE.
A limited number of commissions each year — sculptures for private collectors, corporate collections, and public installations. Every commission is a unique work assembled from found materials gathered specifically for the brief.
For commissions, press enquiries, exhibition proposals, or any conversation about the practice.