Shailee Mehta’s work blends the personal and the historical in an investigation of memory, narrative, imagination and nostalgia. Mangrove, titled after the ecologically significant plant that is found in several places in India, sees two female figures carry a mangrove branch amongst a densely wooded landscape. Mangrove wood is red underneath its brown bark exterior, and, for the artist, offers a visceral signifier of flesh. Here we see a mangrove branch being carried as a wounded body, alluding to the depleting and disappearing status of many plant species due to climate change. The imagery is indicative of this loss but also an imagining of a kind of convalescence.

Mehta is interested in the intersection of contemporary society with the natural world – where attitudes range from reverence to caretaking to possession. One of the figures in the composition is shadowed by a black dog who strides forward next to them. The dog here acts as an allegory for the feral or wild, a juxtaposition to the lifeless wooden body in the women’s arms.