Nature is our best bud.
Mohit Mahato grew up “ a naughty child wanting to tell stories” in Jharkhand’s Jamshedpur surrounded by “everything steel”. He was determined to pursue a career in “mass media communication” until a misfired flowerpot during Diwali celebrations burnt his right hand in eleventh grade.
Flower power
Over a year-long period of painful recovery, he missed the school-term, had to repeat the grade but was also “completely isolated” and “felt like an outcast” among his new classmates. During this time, he rediscovered his love for drawing and paintings, which led to him studying fine arts at the city’s Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath. He landed up in Bengaluru “even before his board exam results were out”. At college, for his ‘Nature Study’ classes, he began collecting different natural elements that caught his eye and bringing them into the studio-space. “Behind the sculpture department, the first thing I collected was a mahogany seed-pod and thought to myself that it would be nice to paint these textures,” he recalls. Slowly, he began “to randomly pick flowers, seeds, leaves or twigs” from the road, drying and arranging them in his house, storing them in boxes of different shapes and sizes without “thinking what am I going to do with it”. At this point, over a decade after the mahogany seed-pod, Mohit accepts that “this act of collecting” is part of his practice too.
He isn’t interested “and doesn’t like to find out” their horticultural histories but rather “keeps the imagination sharp” and lets them speak to him. He picks something out of his collection to describe it as “the Golden Snitch” from the game of Quidditch, then something else reminds him of earpods or a cat’s tongue “because of its roughness and shape” or even “the open jaws of the Demogorgon” from Netflix’s Stranger Things.
In his visual arts practice, Mohit doesn’t simply take inspiration from nature but they become an integral part of his work through bookforms. Painted paper scrolls are tucked into seedpods, or the seed-case acts as the covers of an accordion book, or they’re used as the ‘paper’ for his drawings. In Mohit’s artistic practice, nature is the medium and the message.
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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly Luru Newsletter property which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.
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