When you really think about it, humans are quite unremarkable in form, (if you look beyond the physical attraction). Our bodies are all smooth expanses of skin, symmetrical and plain. Maybe that's why we rely on clothes so much to bring some intrigue through different silhouettes. I am only saying this as a comparison to the bristling spines of a porcupine, the segmented armor of a pill bug, or the undulating tentacles of an octopus — creatures sculpted by evolution into living art.
The natural world is a cathedral of strange, exquisite forms, a sensory playground of textures and silhouettes, where life takes on the shapes of whispers and monsters, spirals and fractals. It’s no wonder that artists, architects, and designers have long drawn from this rich visual lexicon. Cinema, fashion, and sculpture have borrowed the gills of fish, the jagged edges of corals, and the iridescent scales of deep-sea creatures, transforming them into the futuristic, the surreal, and the sublime.
Goa-based Tanushree Singh, the artist behind Lacuna Studio, takes this cross-section of nature and imagination and brings it to life through ceramics. Based in Goa, her work isn’t just inspired by the organic world — it feels as though it belongs to an alternate evolutionary timeline. Her ceramic pieces twist and writhe like something dredged up from the Mariana Trench, each one an artifact from a reality where humans have gills and deep-sea creatures wear porcelain armor. She conjures up strange, otherworldly hybrids — like a scorpion with human fingers for legs, a brain sprouting writhing tentacles, or a frog with delicate mushrooms growing from within.
Lamps shaped like sea anemones, sculptures with the eerie elegance of jellyfish tendrils, ceramic objects that resemble the exoskeletons of undiscovered species — Tanushree is less a traditional artist and more a mad scientist of form, slicing apart natural structures and reassembling them into strange new beings.
Her work doesn’t just mimic the ocean’s inhabitants; it merges them with human anatomy in a way that’s both unsettling and deeply poetic. A ceramic vase shaped like an anatomically correct heart sprouts flowers with eerie realism. Hands and feet appear where they shouldn’t, fused with chitinous shells or the soft, fleshy folds of sea creatures. These hybrids straddle the line between the familiar and the alien, making you question where one world ends and the next begins.
Tanushree's work not only draws from the physical world but also materialises abstract emotions and subconscious narratives, shaping them into tangible forms. At a recent exhibition 'A Dream in the Balcao', she showcased pieces from her series, 'Memory', which delves into the visceral, almost tactile nature of recollection. Memory isn’t just an abstract concept— it has texture, weight, and shape, much like clay itself. Through her work, she crafts a physical manifestation of mental landscapes, where emotion and material collide.
Lacuna Studio is a practice of world-building through ceramics. It’s about seeing life through a lens where the female gaze takes precedence; where storytelling softens the edges of form and turns them into something new — something born of nature but unbound by it. In a world that’s accustomed to rigid, predictable design, Tanushree’s work invites us to embrace the strange, the fluid, and the organic. Perhaps, in doing so, we can learn to see our own human forms as just another variation of nature’s endless experiments with shape and sensation.
Follow Lacuna Studio here.
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