Shailee Mehta

Shailee Mehta (b. 1998, India) lives and works in Mumbai. Mehta received a BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2020. Her solo exhibition Chants from the Hollow opened at Chemould Colab, Mumbai in January 2025. Other selected exhibitions include Mudbath, indigo+madder, London, 2023; In the Belly of a Slovenly Crow, a solo at The Residence Gallery, London, 2020; The Place of Complete Surprise, indigo+madder x Sadie Coles, The Shop, Sadie Coles, London, 2022; There Goes the Neighbourhood, Castor, London, 2022; Run with the Wolves, Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, 2021; and Les Danses Nocturnes, France, 2021, with East Contemporary.

@shaileemehtaa

RESIDENCY: 21 JULY - 20 AUGUST 2025
EXHIBITION: 22 -29 AUGUST 2025

"The works made at the residency are an extension of my existing inquiry into the female body as site of resilience, wonder, disobedience and wildness. They primarily take inspiration from the history of grottoes in Italy, their contribution in creating the notion of the “grotesque”, and Astrida Neimanis’s notion of an alternate, embodied water cycle.

The role of water here is key. I’m looking at the ocean— the primordial soup— as a parallel to the female body who also physically and emotionally gestates, “the one who becomes and facilitates becoming”, to paraphrase Neimanis. Through this, I am attempting to draw attention to just how much we are made of our ecologies. The water cycle is evidence enough that we are as permeable as the soil we stand on. We also seethe and ooze.

We are all signatures of water.

In “Attempts At Osmosis”, for example, the image directly references the Calanchi — local land formations made of clay deposits over long periods of time. It is a process of offering and borrowing, a cycle we also perform in tandem with our surroundings. The figure rests, trying to measure the expanse of this with her body, not with an agenda, but with ease and care.

Whereas in “With All My Oddities” and “Meeting Point”, there is a moment of contemplation as one encounters one’s own body with intimacy, and is met with the same truths and bareness as the stillness of a river or the gait of a wild dog. Here, water plays the role of a medium that permeates, accepts and gently transforms.

The gestures in these images are deliberate yet delicate, as I am interested in rendering a language for the female gaze that generates narratives of curiosity and regeneration. The choice of colours, textures and forms is essentially a mythologising of existing plants such as ferns, seaweeds, algae, mangroves and other organisms found in and around water bodies, that have developed unique adaptations to the cycles of water."

- Shailee Mehta