The 'Clean Girl' Lie: Reethee Venkatesh On Aesthetic Fatigue & The Politics of 'Rot'
In this interview with Homegrown, sculpture artist Reethee Venkatesh breaks down how her artistic practice that confronts systemic violence, legal regulation, and the political control of women's bodies. She discusses navigating body dysmorphia, the limits of gynaehorror, and her rejection of the hyper-sanitized 'clean girl' aesthetic in favor of the messy, undeniable realities of human anatomy. The conversation also explores her satirical initiative, Ick Magazine, her evolving perspectives on antinatalism, and the risk of organic decay ('rot') being commodified into a trendy internet aesthetic.
To live inside a body is to inhabit a zone of constant political negotiation—a physical territory where legal codes and social expectations are drawn. Especially women’s bodies that becomes sites upon which society’s fears and ideals are projected, from purity culture to the ”softness” of the “divine feminine” as tools of subjugation.
A sculptor and illustrator from Chennai, Reethee Venkatesh’s practice is a rejection of the clinical, sanitised aesthetics with which we have come to see bodies online. Working in a style that sits somewhere between body horror assemblage, and ‘lowbrow ‘ surrealism she uses industrial epoxy putty to build heavy, uncomfortable forms that fuse human anatomy into strange, tactile monstrosities.
Her sculptures feel like physical arguments against institutional control. Having spent years inside law school analyzing the rigid codes that dictate bodily autonomy, criminal violence, and systemic power, her hands turn to doughy, fast-hardening M-seal to process those heavy ideas in real, three-dimensional space, lending to a body of work filled with distorted torsos, exposed organs, and absurdities that make an argument for the dark and gooey truths we often seem to forget about our own inevitable decay.
In a conversation with Homegrown, Reethee discusses her journey into sculpture, her fascination with the body, feminism, antinatalism, and the politics of how bodies and culture are represented and consumed:
Could you tell us a little about yourself? How and when did you start making sculptures? What were you doing before you got into sculpture? Was it your medium of choice from the beginning, and what brought you to where you are now?
I started making sculptures sometime in 2018, in law school, when I was encouraged by a professor to make a visual essay for a sociology course. Before that, I mostly drew and painted, although I did make ashtrays for friends.
I was really into fashion design growing up, partly because of my uncle Ananth, who is a fashion designer and a lawyer. He taught me how to sketch and is probably the reason I even have a creative bone.
Learning about M-seal was quite crucial to my practice because it was so cheap. Sculpture really worked for me because the objects exist in the same dimension as I do. They feel more real to me, and in a strange way, validate my existence because I made them - making me real. I also enjoy M-seal, clay, and other mouldable media the most because the technique feels much more intuitive to me than 2D or digital media.
M-seal is, however, a difficult medium if you're trying to achieve a very specific effect. During COVID, I had a lot of time, and Amazon was delivering M-seal by the kilo to my house, so I was able to get a better hang of it.
My mother, Shantha, who is from a relatively conservative background and has no business understanding of what I do or why I do it, has nevertheless been incredibly supportive, along with my friends. Without them, there would probably be no art coming from me.
Your sculptures can be genuinely uncomfortable to look at, especially when you distort or expose parts of the body. What is it about body horror or gynaehorror that makes it such a useful language for talking about things like misogyny, sexual violence and reproductive politics?
Making people uncomfortable, or using body horror as a tool to make a feminist point, has never really been my intention. My work is more of a reflection of the imagery and symbolism I use as visual vocabulary to understand the world around me.
I am a feminist, so the stories that urge my work are inevitably going to have a feminist undertone to them.
In terms of body horror or gynaehorror as a language, I am actually unsure of how useful it is. I've never particularly wanted my work to be read through the horror genre lens, especially because horror is often associated with shock value. I do think that visceral imagery, when combined with subjects that are already emotionally sensitive, can sometimes be counterproductive when talking about feminist themes outside of circles that already align with your tastes or beliefs.
It has the capacity to capture experiences of severe patriarchal violence quite accurately, but it can also create an echo chamber of people who already understand or agree with the politics engage with it, while everyone else simply averts their eyes.
That's something I've been contending with a lot lately, and trying to work past.
You have described being fascinated by how the human body can be “gross, functional and beautiful,” and that fascination seems to run through your work, which combines disgust, humour and critique. Where does that sensibility come from and how did it develop? Were there particular films, artists, or other forms of “gross” media that shaped the way you see the body growing up? Are you a fan of body horror films — Cronenberg, for instance, or are there other influences that have stayed with you?
Cronenberg, Giger, Satoshi Kon, Junji Ito, and even Kafka are all people whose work I was introduced to by people who engaged with my work and recommended them to me. But I think my fascination with the body began much earlier.
Even in primary school, my mother desperately wanted me to grow up to be a doctor, and taught me a lot about human anatomy. That really stuck with me, familiarising and normalising certain ideas and images around the body.
Growing up in a fat body, having pigmented, sensitive skin, and dealing with dysmorphia in a conservative home and school environment also sealed in that fascination. I think I became interested in the body largely as a way of building a sense of self.
These are inherently heavy and absurd themes, so humour became a crucial part of my imagination.
I do like body horror films and shows. Off the top of my head, the ones that have really stuck with me are Crimes of the Future, Paprika, Titane, Attack on Titan, Infinity Pool, and The House That Jack Built.
You have a background in law, and your work deals with things like bodily autonomy, gendered violence and institutional control. How much does that education still shape the way you think about the body — especially the regressive and harmful laws around it, like marital rape, for example?
Law school is where I had my political awakening and built much of my moral compass. It was also where I learnt that my experiences weren't just personal and were part of larger hierarchies that laws play a role in constructing and protecting.
It was a bit like eating the red pill (not the manosphere kind).
Having studied and worked on criminal and family cases as well, I don't think I will ever be able to unsee how laws define and penetrate homes, bodies and brains in civil society.
That has inevitably shaped how I look at the body. I think once you've learnt to see the ways institutions regulate bodies and relationships, it's very difficult to separate the physical body from the systems around it.
Your work often takes things that are hidden, censored or made uncomfortable about women’s bodies and puts them in front of the viewer. Do you see the grotesque as a way of reclaiming the female body from the way it has historically been sexualised, objectified and controlled? I also wonder what you make of the current ‘clean girl’ aesthetic and this very sanitised version of femininity that women are constantly being sold. Do you see any problems with that idea of what a woman’s body should look like and how it should present itself? What do you think there is to gain from choosing the ‘grotesque’ over the ‘clean,’ and is there something liberating about letting the body be messy, strange, excessive or even ‘ugly’?
The thing about bodies is that they are largely hidden from everyone other than the person themselves. Some people even internalise this to the point of keeping their bodies hidden from themselves.
I've always had one skin issue after another that was worsened by the friction caused by my fat. Dermatologists didn't really have solutions for a lot of the holes in my skin, scarring, acne and so on, so those things became normal to me.
For people like me, with strange skin or conventionally unattractive body types, adopting the clean girl aesthetic simply isn't an option. Without contending with how we look and the twisted ways in which the world perceives us, some of us can't really go about our day-to-day lives without developing our own sense of self, style, personality and aesthetic instead of subscribing to a fad.
For me, that becomes less about reclamation and more about survival.
I think this is also why the clean girl aesthetic is so unsustainable; it isn't even current anymore. Bodies are inherently grotesque; there is no escaping that. It's really only a question of how much you're willing to play pretend, and how much you're willing or able to change about your life in order to maintain an illusion.
I knew from a very young age that I didn’t want kids, and I know how difficult it can be to say that out loud in India. I’m curious about your own journey towards antinatalism: what made you arrive at that position, and what are some of the frustrations you’ve faced in choosing a life that goes against such a deeply ingrained expectation for women?
Funnily enough, until around 2019, my biggest goal in life was to become a mother and vicariously experience love and acceptance through my child/children.
During my COVID-time musings, I arrived at an idea which I subsequently found to be antinatalism. A lot of it came from my own negative experience of life and from questioning whether I could ethically justify bringing another person into a world where pain is so profoundly unavoidable and starkly disproportionate to pleasure.
I still strongly stand by some aspects of antinatalism, but I'm also realising that I had missed some of the more intersectional aspects of the ideology. I've had the privilege of discussing my hot takes with people from very different identities and backgrounds, who have rightly pointed out the pitfalls of treating birthing a new person as blatantly and inherently selfish or unethical.
So I think my position is becoming less absolute as I learn more. I'm still interested in the question, but I don't think I have the same certainty about the answer that I once did.
You recently posted about Ick Magazine, which seems like a natural extension of the sensibility running through your work. Could you tell us a little about the magazine? What are you hoping to do with it, and what kinds of ideas, conversations or forms of expression are you hoping to explore through it?
As a person who spends a significant amount of time on the internet trying to keep up with whatever we now believe to be culture, I truly hate how everything is an aesthetic, has taken inspiration from, is something coded or something core.
I agree that most art, and probably most thoughts, are references of references. But in trying to make everything more consumable, viral and clickable, I think we've lost a lot of the point. Even the act of making references is actively changing with generative AI, where evidently referenced images/content can be presented with a concerning tone of unreferenced originality.
A lot of the media and art surrounding culture that we're presented with is real but feels incredibly fake. I wanted to make something that was fake but felt real.
Without a formal arts or design background, I wanted to build a framework within which I could experiment with photography and graphic design to get constructive feedback from my peers.
As I mentioned earlier, my uncle is a fashion designer and used to have a Vogue subscription. I used to really look forward to spending time with every edition that arrived. That, coupled with how much I enjoy photo editing, playing with words, researching, and pondering daily absurdities, made the idea of a fake magazine cover feel whimsical enough to capture all of that.
The project is still in its early stages, but I am very excited about the process, the upcoming collaborations with artists and friends who have shared interests, and to see what exactly this turns into.
‘Rot ' has become such a girl-coded idea online, from ‘girl rot’ to ‘bed rotting’ and this whole embrace of decay. Why do you think girls have claimed rot in this way? Do you see it as a kind of coping mechanism for dealing with a world that can be especially violent towards women, or even an anti-capitalist response to revolt against the rat race and creating value for the shareholder? What do you think rot represents for you, and why do you think it has developed these feminist undertones?
We, along with most things around us interacting with organic elements, are constantly rotting. Human bodies, more often than not, are rotting only on the inside, with that rot becoming externalised through sickness, accidents, old age, body conditions and vulnerabilities, and eventually death. For me, it was made visible quite early on because of my skin conditions.
Most of us have received unsolicited advice from aunties and/or Instagram ads about how to cover up or reverse this internal deterioration, usually through temporary solutions that require time, upkeep, labour, community and money - resources that only some people can afford and/or outsource.
Eventually, we're all burnt or buried or whatever, but covered/cleaned up nonetheless.
So I think it is quite natural that girls, queers, and people who are generally more aware of the macabre nature of our existence have claimed some of the ideas and lingo associated with rot on the internet.
But I also think there's something interesting and slightly troubling happening now. In a post-truth society, once “rot” becomes girlified, aestheticised, or reduced to meaningless niche references, it departs from being self-aware/satirical and can itself become another tool for reinforcing gender norms and/or other regressive ideas.
Something that begins as an acknowledgement of the reality of our bodies can very easily become another aesthetic, another identity, another thing to consume with hidden caveats.
And that, to me, is worth being concerned about.
Follow Reethee here.
If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:
Subarna Dash's 'This Is TMI' Uses Breasts To Unpack Objectification & Feminine Identity
khokkosh.’s ‘freeuse .org’ Is A Disturbingly Tender Meditation On The Body & Desire
M. Jose's Body Horror & Folklore Art Is A Hauntingly Beautiful Subversion Of Tradition
