Artist Statement

I make sculptures and installations from foraged trees and grasses. My practice draws from biophilosophy, architecture, decolonial theory, material science, and speculative fiction. Underlying my work is a suspicion of being overcome by a strange vegetal force. Limbs turn under my sockets, and her delicate reptilian shape moves inside my trunk. This sensation of uncanny possession by alien life informs my exploration of postcolonial subjectivity, mimicry, and hybridity in a time of climate collapse.

I utilize cellulose fibers from waste lawn clippings, polymerizing them into a grass-based bioplastic that functions like a vegan leather. The material was developed during a year-long residency in 2020. I weave complex tensile structures from trees such as birch, maple, linden, and lilac. Plants are foraged from gardens, landfills, plantation orchards, and cemeteries, cultivated sites where human systems produce landscape. I layer my bioplastic over these tree scaffolds, working from the inside out in the manner of living tissue. Through a ritualistic process, I transform these organic materials into haunted, placental membranes that hover between states of life and death.

My sculptures deploy formalist concerns such as figure-ground reversals, layered expressive gestures, and abstracted botanical motifs that rise across a visceral materiality. Their fractalizing geometries conjure prehistoric ancestors and a feminine vegetal power that articulates my embodied and sensorial experiences with the vital forces of life. Slowly shifting in color and form over time, the works express my multivalent agency, alienation, and migrant identity.

Philosophy

I am interested in the mysterious and vital forces that plants wield on our planet, their subtle adaptations to rapidly changing environments, and their economies of perpetuation within human-dominant systems. Grass, a broad category of more than ten thousand species within the Poaceae family that evolved fifty-five million years ago and now covers over a third of the planet, forms a central node in my research. Through my sculptures, I consider the geo-cultural dissonance between the semi-arid savanna landscapes of my childhood in Central India and the global lawns, emblematic of capitalism, ecological destruction, and a steadily fading American dream.

Sometimes my sculptures form abstracted landscapes that rewild postindustrial interiors. Other times they evoke spectral bodies, corpses, and animal hides that imbue the materials with a psychic agency. Works such as FIELD [untitled] investigate the vernacular history of grass as both a mundane and sacred material across and beyond South Asia. Collectively, these aesthetic provocations reappropriate conceptions of otherness as a blooming interiority and an emergent mystical wilderness.

Titles in my work follow nomenclatures that entangle natural and cultural systems. Each work carries the title FIELD, a reference to our collective agrarian past. A secondary title identifies the trees used in the work. In larger pieces, tertiary texts drawn from my journals and travelogues describe my inability to assimilate within changing contexts and my longing for home, stasis, and milieu.