Artist Statement

I work at the intersections of architecture, sculpture, and landscape. I utilize fallen trees and grasses to create drawings, sculptures, and architectural interventions that historicize legacies of vernacular architecture in India and speculate plant-based perspectives in a rewilded posthuman future. I am interested in conceptions of reality, pleasure, and nature within philosophical practices associated with the global south.

My current project FIELD considers the cultivated lawns in contemporary cities to explore how our conceptions of nature are shaped by colonial narratives. I collect grass-clippings from freshly-mown lawns in parks, cemeteries, landfills, and plantation orchards – cultivated sites where human systems produce the “natural” landscape. I boil, wash, and cook the clippings on my stovetop, adding vinegar, starch, and other common kitchen ingredients to plasticize the grass into a natural, biodegradable bioplastic. The material is wet, smelling like compost, when applied. I work intuitively, allowing its fibers to guide the forms. I use turmeric, indigo, tea tree and peppermint oil to dye and scent the bioplastic. I embalm the material over recently withered trees including maple, birch, and linden, working inside out, in the manner of bones, muscle, and skin. Sculptures air-dry over days, shrinking and incorporating. The grass is my more-than-human partner. It is a rhizomatic traveler with shallow roots, displaced like me. Through my ritualistic practice, it develops agency, a grotesque vernacular identity. Through FIELD I reflect on my own immigrant identity, alienation, and anxiety in the face of climate collapse.

My work historicizes legacies of vernacular architecture in rural India, where earth, grass, and wood are utilized as local resources in temporary (kuchha) constructions in homes and animal shelters. These architectures are understood for their sophistication, sustainability, and craft. In my use of materials, I expand upon the poetics and politics of these histories, imbuing my sculptures with a sense of time and place, and a fundamental acknowledgement of the cyclical transience of things. Genetically modified Bermuda grasses have replaced native and wild species across most cities globally, are extremely resource intensive, invasive, and unsustainable. Their abundance represents processes of urbanization, modernist city constructs, and the homogenization of public space. By utilizing these GMO waste-lawn clippings as a material for sculpture, I revitalize a common material, rewilding it through a ritualistic exorcism. The grass grows limbs, skin, and body, developing a speculative, grotesque, and plant-based perspective for a posthuman future.