At the crest of waves in a turbulent sea one could see boats being tossed up and down and in each boat there are tiny human figures almost resembling the short-lived moths of monsoon, rising up like foams, absolutely helpless in their movements. This is the story of the present times where global migration of dispossessed people has become a daily staple for the well settled and rooted. These boats partly submerged however struggle towards a lamp post, a metaphor of good hope, a sculptural stand in for a welcoming terra firma. But the precariousness is palpable for none including the artist/creator knows whether those hapless creatures in the boats would ever reach the destinations they always dream of.

KS Radhakrishnan, in his hall mark style uses the ascending ramp form as the metaphorical oceanic surface without its undulating waves. The flatness of glistening bronze tiles virtually creates an ensemble of waves and the half boats represent their rise and fall along the ebb and flow of the tumultuous waves. An artist who believes in the ultimate transcendence of human beings or their possibilities to do so, he has always brought the ramp structure to represent such sublimation. He often refers to the liminal position of the human beings from where they could rise up to their final deliverance. While it has a spiritual connotation in some of his sculptures in ‘Ephemera’ it emphasizes a material, social and political fact in the most subtle, lyrical and metaphorical way possible.

The stick figures resembling ‘eeyalukal/moths’ with ephemeral lives is an apt metaphor for the momentary nature of human lives too. ‘Material desires are like lighting/ Life also gets over too fast’, says Ezhuthachan, one of the Bhakti poets in Malayalam. Philosophers from Heraclitus’ time have been talking about Time as a River. Nothing remains, everything changes and one does not dip twice in the same river. Radhakrishnan believes in these aspects of life and he has done ambitious public sculptures such as ‘Kala-Pravaham’ (Time Tide) in Mananchira, Kozhikode, Kerala.
In ‘Ephemera’, he takes the philosophical meaning towards the materialistic and socio-political conditions of the contemporary times. The technical virtuosity with which Radhakrishnan has created the crest and fall of the waves and the tossing and toying of the boats has its roots in the ecstatic dancers who move towards their sublimation in his famous ‘Ramp’ sculptural installation done a decade ago.