Through my works in Garden of Un-earthly Delights, I try to explore the place that Nature holds in the human imagination today. 

I construct images and places that are at once gardens and urban jungles – both psychological constructs and cultural landscapes. In my sculptures of fictional, anthropomorphized plants that are composed of brightly colored body parts and foliage, I reflect upon the Human/Nature divide, and how the gap between the real and the imaginary, the everyday and the fantastic, and the familiar and the unfamiliar is constantly being negotiated in our own perception. 

How has technology changed the way we look at Nature? Plants and animals that were once exotic are now commonplace – instantly recognizable from their many images in magazines, on television, and on the internet. The human body is hardly as mysterious as it once was. Graphic, highly detailed images and videos of all these are now a part of popular culture. But it seems that despite this abundance of information, Nature and the human body continue to compel the human imagination. Like our ancestors, we continue to be fascinated by our bodies and our surroundings. They are not only a part of science and fine art but also a part of popular culture and design.

I am also interested in engaging with how artists have viewed Nature and the human body through different periods in the history of art. It is like a vast archive of human consciousness – a rich resource for understanding the evolution of the human viewpoint on the body, its surroundings and, indeed, Nature. For instance, the excess, theatricality, and dark humour in the works of the surrealists completely changed how we view everyday objects and the human body. In fact, a few centuries ago, Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Garden of Earthly Delights was an early precursor to the works of the surrealists because of its joyful excess, theatricality, absurdity and hallucinatory details. In a completely different way, Rousseau’s evocation of an imaginary, exotic world constructed almost entirely from second-hand sources in his studio has the power to lift us from the mundane into another world altogether. Similarly, over the centuries, many artists have created windows into imaginary, fictional worlds that help us transcend the numbing reality of the everyday.

Over the years, however, with the crazy proliferation of images in the media, both print and virtual, it has become increasingly difficult for an artist to present a fresh and memorable image. Our consciousness is not easily touched, let alone shocked. Images are too easily consumed and discarded. So, in these circumstances, a dense, intense image that slows down our interaction with it has the potential to provide us with a rich, meaningful visual experience. The use of deliberate contradictions and juxtapositions in the work, both visually as well as materially, allows the emergence of a strange, compelling beauty which may, in turn, become a possible springboard for the transformation of the mind and emotion.