‘My primary artistic curiosity is on principles of growth, its rhythms, patterns, and tensions.’ Born in 1978, she received a B. F. A. in Painting from the New Delhi based the College of Art in in 2001 and an M. F. A. in Printmaking from the Winchester School of Art in the UK, in 2004. She has exhibited her works throughout India and the UK, including Ghosts in the Machine at Apeejay Media Gallery in Delhi, and at Project 88 in Mumbai. She is a recipient of many awards and residencies, including the KHOJ International Arts & Sciences Residency as well as the INLAKS Fine Art Award.

Q: What is the core idea of your new series? How did it come about?
A: Over the past two years I have been exploring some ideas put forward in Goethe’s Botanical writings in which Goethe’s search for “that which was common to all plants without distinction” led him to evolve a purely mental concept of the archetypal plant. This archetype, when translated into art by some of his followers, resulted in what one writer has described as a ‘botanists’ nightmare’ consisting of all known leaves and flowers combined around a single stem.

This archetype or ‘Urpflanze’ describes “one basic form that manifests in the multitude of single plant individuals; and within this basic form, there lies the potential for endless transformation, by which manifoldness is created out of oneness.” What result are hybrid organics that float in a twilight world between imagined and observed reality…forms in constant flux, in a state of continuous transformation. They could be denizens of a science-fictional botanical garden, specimens in a bizarre cabinet of curiosity or portents of a distant future.

Q: How will you define your work?
A: My primary artistic curiosity is on principles of growth, its rhythms, patterns, and tensions. Areas of research have included pattern recognition and pattern formation within organic form and an understanding of the universal underlying structure within nature’s complexity. More recently, my practice has focused on trying to define the ambiguous space between science and art, imagined and observed reality.

Q: In today’s urban environ, how do you look for influences amidst nature?
A: My work explores the possibilities contained within nature, where organisms are born, breed and multiply. Drawing upon and morphing elements of the botanical, zoological, human, and mechanical worlds, flesh, plant, machine, animal, organic and inorganic come together to fashion a hybrid with obscure antecedents. The result is somewhat unclassifiable, a category unto itself. In the scientific realm, as the rate of genetic modification accelerates, and the boundary of form and function blurs, these strange hybrid organics become more of a possibility of what could be.

Q: What are your preferred media?
A: I enjoy working in many media, including digital prints, drawing and video. Each brings something unique to the work and consequently carries it some uncharted territory.

Q: How has been the viewer response to the works?
A: What I hope people take away from the show is a sense of what could be; this idea of a cognizant, non-passive nature capable of looking back at you…

Rohini Devasher’s ‘BREED’ at Project 88