Mixed media: Art made of everyday objects has a brush with market

It allows artists to express various themes without being confined to a single medium

Bharti Kher's mixed media artwork sold for an estimated $1.5 million (Rs 7 crore) at a Sotheby’s auction in London in June 2010. 'The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own' is a life-size female fibre-glass elephant covered in bindis arranged in a serpentine pattern. It alludes to the Hindu concept of the third eye and the number zero. Kher uses resin, everyday objects, and "hybrid creatures" in her mixed media installations which have the bindi as a recurring motif to explore identity, mythology, and gender.

In 15 years since that auction, mixed media art is still