Clay caricaturist Charuvi Agrawal turns larger-than-life icons into amusing two-inch sculptures that tickle more than just your imagination

Charuvi's passion is as rare as her name. A dainty, dusky damsel of 26, she binds humour, aesthetics, exaggeration and technology in clay, and frees imagination in turn. She's dabbled in painting, animation and clay art, and combined them all in what she calls 'Claytronics', a pursuit that won her a place in the Limca Book of World Records. We entered her room and made way through skybags, easels, paintbrushes and old Labrador Oops to find what we were looking for: the heart of her art.u00a0u00a0

Do you remember your first tryst with clay play?
I was always interested in quirky art, but it was back in the 9th grade that my parents brought me a special packet of clay from the US, and I started squeezing it at summer siesta hour. Soon after, I subconsciously found myself copying IK Gujral's features from a newspaper. The face came out well, but the rest of the body was out of proportion, making the whole thing cartoonish. To have some more fun, I quickly modelled him with a diaper, and a huge safety pin hanging out. I didn't realise anything as I went through the process, but my dad could. He quickly defined the sculpture as a 3D caricature that had a story behind it: a coalition party baby-sitting our then Prime Minister. That's how I coined the term Claytronics.