In 'āranyaka', Arunima Choudhury Reimagines The Forest As A Site of Memory & Resistance

My eyes desire green

My body desires a green garden

Bring the trees and plant them here

Let me look at them

— Shakti Chattopadhyay, Let Me Look at Them (translated by Arunava Sinha)

A prolific painter and devoted gardener, Arunima Choudhury (b. 1950, Siliguri) has long been attuned to the textures and rhythms of the natural world using experimental techniques combined with natural dyes and pigments. Her work reveals both an affection for and unease about the fragility of nature, portraying a world that is lush, mysterious, and under threat. Through eco-printing — a process that transfers the physical imprint of leaves and flowers directly onto surfaces — alongside depictions of birds, animals, insects, forests, and human figures, Choudhury weaves a visual narrative centered on survival, coexistence, and environmental loss in her visual arts practice.

Arunima Choudhury’s ongoing solo exhibition, 'āranyaka', at Emami Art, Kolkata, is a meditation on the fragility of the natural world, and on the intertwined fates of humans and the more-than-human. Her ecological concerns are neither didactic, nor purely aesthetic. They are embedded in the materials she uses, which resist modern visual culture’s focus on instantaneity. Using leaves, flowers, and plant matter pressed directly onto paper and fabric, she creates organic prints that carry the marks of decay, change, and time. Her eco prints are slow to make and even slower to fade — each a record of a leaf’s presence, a pigment’s reaction with another, and a season’s residue on a handmade surface.

Environmentalism in Indian art has often moved in tandem with broader political and cultural discourses, from the Bhil and Gond traditions’ cosmologies of interdependence to the Bengal School’s pastoral nationalism in the late colonial period. In the late-1900s and early-2000s, artists like K.G. Subramanyan, Ganesh Pyne, and A. Ramachandran drew inspiration from folk and natural motifs as a way of asserting rootedness amidst rapid industrialisation and urban alienation. But it is only in the anthropocene — marked by human dominance over nature, industrial growth, ecological crises, extractive capitalism, and climate-induced internal displacement — that environmental art in India has taken on a renewed urgency.

Choudhury, now in her seventies, has always been ahead of that curve. Her earlier exhibitions, including The Dark Edge of Green (2022, also at Emami Art), already established her as a significant voice in ecological art. But in āranyaka, the tone feels more reflective — even mournful. This is not a celebration of nature, but a reckoning with what’s already lost, what we’re losing, and what remains.

āranyaka: Arunima Choudhury’s Recent Works on Nature is on view at Emami Art, Kolkata, till 9 August 2025. Learn more about the exhibition here.

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