Garden of Un-Earthly Delights

Written by Beth Citron (2023)

From the time of her MFA studies at Goldsmith’s College in London in the mid 2000s, artist Suhasini Kejriwal has created profoundly imaginative landscapes that draw on detailed observations from her daily life. Kejriwal’s rigorous practice spans painting and sculpture, and figuration and abstraction, investigating the unruliness of urban, jungle, and desert environments and the unusual juxtapositions and hybridities that mark everyday visual culture in India today. A hallmark of Kejriwal’s practice is her integration of multiple materials and densities into individual works, with paintings incorporating drawing, photography, collage, and collaboration, and large-scale sculptures adorned with hand-embroidered or intricately painted surfaces. Episodically, Kejriwal has returned to the study of natural forms and the creatures that dwell amidst them, with earlier presentations of teeming paintings and anthropomorphic totems in London and at the Anokhi Museum in Jaipur. Kejriwal uses real references to bridge organic and geometric flora and foliage, building a landscape that is transcendent in detail, color, and saturation. In this work as across her practice, Kejriwal attends to the breadth of psychological, conceptual, and even historical relationships underlying individual formal choices. For example, in this series, all of the botanicals and leaves are drawn directly from species in her own home garden, a sanctuary during the years of the covid pandemic while simultaneously a testament to the isolation and uncomfortable stillness of the period. In this sense, Kejriwal performs seriously the role of witness, not only in an adherence to what is seen and but also with the commitment to felt experience. Kejriwal has developed a particular and canny interest in the transnational history of English gardens, mapping the movement of her own work onto colonial and postcolonial histories across Britain and India. As part of the process of “taming” India and overlaying an image of home onto the subcontinent, the British brought many botanical species and designs for gardens to India (where the refined Mughal garden had reigned for several centuries). This has resulted in many new and hybrid species in urban India today, which Kejriwal comments on through evocative and sometimes psychedelic layers of images in her compositions. These works reject both the implied orientalist exoticism of the subcontinent and the propriety of the manicured English garden, especially as they are now – perhaps ironically – exported again to London in a contemporary global context. The long-term cross-pollinations and solidarities resulting from colonial histories also parallel Kejriwal’s interest in deep time, a scale of measuring the earth that extends beyond the human. While earlier versions of Kejriwal’s totemic sculptures featured embroidered surfaces and examined the relationship between hard and soft materials, this series reflects an evolution to hand-painted bronze and an enlarged scale. In this medium, the artist aligns herself with a conventional material of monumental public sculpture while also retaining her position as a painter attuned to small and fantastical forms. At the same time, and perhaps most radically, Kejriwal’s sculptures defy the figural expectation of totems, showing the enormous and indeed enduring power of nature across past and future, and the otherworldly and everyday.