Artist Statement

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

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

My sculptures deploy formalist concerns such as figure-ground reversals, layered expressive gestures, and abstracted, often botanical motifs rising across a visceral materiality. Their fractalizing geometries conjure pre-historic ancestors, and a feminine-vegetal power that articulates my embodied and sensorial experiences with vital forces of life. Subtly changing in color and form over time, the works express my own 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 over 10,000 species from the Poaceae family that evolved 55 million years ago and covers over a third of the planet, is the central node within my research. Through my sculptures, I consider the geo-cultural dissonance between the semi-arid savanna landscapes from my childhood in Central India with contemporary manicured urban lawns - emblematic of capitalism, racism, ecological destruction, and an outdated American Dream.

Sometimes my sculptures form abstracted landscapes that rewild postindustrial interiors, or they evoke spectral bodies, corpses, and animal hides that implicate materials with a kind of psychic agency. Works like FIELD [untitled] investigate the vernacular history of grass as a mundane and a sacred material in and beyond South Asia. Collectively, their 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 is titled FIELD, an oblique reference to our collective agrarian past. A secondary title provides information on the trees used in the work. In larger pieces, tertiary texts are drawn from my journals and travelogues. They describe my inability to assimilate within a changing context, and my longing for home, stasis, and milieu.