A World Made of Nature Created her Untidy Beauty, Captured her Maker's Eye but not Once but Thrice "Culture" who Played her a Fool, Maimed her Walk and Unsweetened her Magic

Rina Banerjee creates fantastical worlds in which mythical creatures and disparate objects exist together in complex layerings, whether in large scale installations, sculpture or intimate watercolors. Her love of materials has resulted in enchanting compositions, which confront the legacy of British colonial rule and Orientalism but are deeply rooted around her attempts to find connections between cultures. She elaborates, "Empires, when they grew rapidly, do so by accumulating and consuming, eating what was never theirs. Perpetually seizing land and amassing beautiful, bizarre foreign objects, these empires were also being eaten and possessed. Like fine continuous threads, we denizens of empires become entangled with each other's tastes in an infinite messy web of exchange, dominated by commerce by land, by sea, and by air." Banerjee translates this visually into a dream-like world, a quixotic universe of strange creatures amongst an explosion of hybrid flora and fauna. The organisms seem suspended in time and although there are subtle undercurrents of more sinister lurkings, Banerjee succeeds in seducing the viewer into a world laced with mysticism. She currently has a solo show at the Museé Guimet in Paris.