Scapelands

About

The exhibition presents the artists’ continuing engagement with the natural and organic world. The works are a result of several years of research and documentation of ‘sites’ in diverse locations.

An exhibition of recent works by Sonia Mehra Chawla, Scapelands examines the development of the artist’s strategies that unsettle conventional wisdom about our relationship with and within nature and take on a notion of turning inwards into a phenomenological experience of life.

Based on her navigations in the Sunderbans in West Bengal and Pichavaram in Tamil Nadu, both biomes of mangroves; the forests of Uttarakhand; fallen boughs in Goa and Pondicherry; and a riverbank in Thailand,Chawla engages with the natural and organic world — a result of several years of research and documentation of sites across geographies.Her creative process involves working intimately with various mediums: painting, printmaking, photography andvideo. As an artist-in-residence at the London Print Studioin the UK in 2014, she experimented with photopolymer gravure, a form of non-toxic intaglio printmaking, which is elemental to the works displayed in this exhibition.

Chawla’s artistic practice is concerned with the construction of nature that is defined not just as the physical world around us but also the conditions of our physical, metaphorical, social and ecological interactions with it. Drawing inspiration from the tropes of germination, gestation, ecotopiaand science fiction, she explores spaces, and the articulation of human experiences within these spaces — both inner and outer.

Through her practice, she endeavours to transform everyday earthly images into phantasmagorical visions, landscapes that could be from the earth’s primordial past or vistas from distant planetary surfaces we are yet to encounter. Evolution through dynamic growth and metamorphosis is fundamental to the imagery in Chawla’s works.