Plants Invoking Goddesses
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 plants and 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
The situations and stories in these works evoke imagination in the viewer’s mind to remember the forgotten notions of care and symbiosis.
Forest invoking Sapta Mātrikās
Here, different protagonists of the forests (shurbs, soils, water, plants, trees, vines, fungi, birds, leaves, branches, rocks) convene to discuss their rights with Sapta Mātrikās. Here, forests invoke these goddesses, intending to reclaim these goddesses, for their (forests’) well-being and protection.
On the invocation of Forests, these 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.
With this approach of changing certain details in mythology, I aim to envision a different past and possible futures in which diversity is celebrated and humans are not the only intelligent and apex species. These work challenges history and culture to create an opportunity to re-examine the present.
