Rithika Pandey’s journey into art began as a quest to learn about her like-minded ancestors. During a year off from art school, she attended two residency programmes—the first in a small Portuguese town, the other on an organic farm in Spain—and spent some time travelling around the Scottish countryside, an experience that was instrumental in forging a connection between her practice and the natural world. “I just wanted to be in a space where my mind could expand equivalently to the landscape,” she says. “The world of my paintings is a process of connecting with the more-than-human.”
Pandey is especially inspired by the writings of Donna Haraway and Ursula K Le Guin, and is evolving her artistic practice through the lens of science and research. “I am looking at our ecological connections and finding a way to bridge that with a sense of future-thinking,” she adds. Her body of work—the “theatre of her paintings” as she calls it—compounds into a mythology in its own right, characterised by a futuristic, somewhat human protagonist that speaks of our collective resilience, recovery and transformation. At the start of this year, Pandey had her first solo show in India with Chemould CoLab, and simultaneously showcased an installation at the Mumbai Urban Art Festival hosted by St+art and Asian Paints at Sassoon Docks. “I also ended up doing this beautiful project with a Wales-based collective, Gentle/Radical, where I offered a painting to the town of Riverside in Cardiff, and alongside the painting, I made a zine filled with contemplative questions,” she adds.
