E3 – Ephemeral Echoes of the Earth at Kalamkar Gallery, Bikaner House, New Delhi – 110011

The Earth is abundant, but it is not infinite. Its forests, waters, minerals and natural resources—formed and replenished across vast stretches of time—are being consumed at a pace the planet can no longer sustain. Even that which renews itself becomes fragile when human desire exceeds nature’s capacity for regeneration.

For centuries, humankind has imagined nature as something to be conquered, tamed and possessed. Mountains became mines, forests became timber, rivers were harnessed and oceans harvested. Industrialisation intensified this separation, creating the illusion that the natural world exists as an inexhaustible reservoir for human ambition. Today, the consequences of this estrangement are increasingly written across the landscape.

Against this backdrop, the works of Anika Jain, Jasmeet Khurana, Kanika Raj Singh, Pooja Hada, Poonam Bevli Sahi and Suparna Arora invite us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world. Through six distinct artistic practices, nature emerges not merely as subject or landscape, but as memory, metaphor, material and living presence. The artists of this exhibition have also given me the curator a space to express my artistic bent of mind and we have a curator’s wall, that gives, me, Georgina Maddox, an artistic voice alongside theirs.

There is something particularly resonant in bringing together the perspectives of six women artists around the idea of nature and nurture. Their works explore the instinct to observe, preserve, regenerate and reconnect, replacing the language of dominion with one of coexistence. Nature is no longer something outside ourselves, but a larger ecology to which we remain intimately and inevitably bound.

The exhibition does not propose an idyllic return to an untouched past, nor does it offer an escapist utopia. Instead, it asks us simply to look again—to relinquish the impulse to conquer and rediscover the possibility of growing alongside the Earth.

Art cannot replenish a forest or return water to a disappearing river. It can, however, transform the way we see. It can awaken attention, restore wonder and remind us of what we stand to lose.

Perhaps regeneration begins here: in nurturing what nurtures us, in valuing what remains, and in remembering that we do not stand apart from nature—we belong to it.