Forest Invoking Vaishnavi
61 x 92 cm
Watercolor and Gouache on Wasli Paper
2024
from the series:
Forest invoking Sapta Mātrikās
From the lens of environmental equilibrium and reproductive justice, these works intersect the boundaries of precarious ecologies, archetypal allegories, and speculative fiction. This body of work seeks to draw attention to the sovereignty of ecology, ecology’s fertility, and the rights of nature.
Based on speculation, here forests convene to discuss their rights with archaic goddesses of fertility and abundance. Here, forests invoke these deities and cultural symbols, intending to reclaim these goddesses, for their (forests’) well-being and protection.
By counter-portraying mother goddesses and cross-pollinating them with fictitious realities to allow opportunities for mythic re-imagination. This process of subverting the existing stories and inventing fiction from mythology and the natural world offer powerful tools to de-patriarch-ize the existing dualist constructs of nature and culture, therefore, raising questions concerning power and agency, difference and sociality, and, ontology and epistemology.
In these paintings collectively titled, 'Forest invoking Sapta Mātrikās’, the goddesses have now taken on the heads of the animals upon which they are traditionally shown riding to reflect on human and non-human relations.
The Mātrikās are a collective of seven or eight goddesses, whose paradoxical natures express the interrelationship between the cyclical nature of women’s bodies and perennial earth-based rituals. Mātrikās serve as divinities demarcating the boundaries between order and chaos, internal and external realms, seen and unseen forces. They are Mother Goddesses, yet not restricted to the procreative implication of motherhood. Their anthropomorphic representations depict them as creatures of paradox: either sensual or grotesque, birth-givers or destroyers. This live spirit is the fertile force that makes the land yield corn, roots and flowers, the herds to multiply and women to bring forth offspring.