Go Easy On Me Baby...it’s My First Time Too

Nature Shankar’s practice favors circulation over stasis, favoring fluid, prismatic abstractions over fixed images. Attuned to the Eastern view that being is shaped somatically before mentally, she rejects inherited bodily suppression, treating the body as both archive and conduit to explore how grief and anger are metabolized. Her approach aligns with Traditional Chinese Medicine and Hindu philosophy—frameworks she absorbed early, growing up with an Indian-Hindu father and Chinese-Buddhist mother—where energy never dies but cycles through different states of being.

Womanhood remains at the fore of Shankar’s concerns, and embodiment emerges as an abstract condition—one that treats the body as a repository of care, rage, endurance, and historical pressure. Here, the unspoken and often illegible affects of a femme body register through density, abrasion, repetition, and repair rather than explicit statement. The artist dissects limiting transcultural mores and social regimens that reduce a body to an object and political agent. It should also be noted that Shankar has not fully abandoned the external. She locates herself within the shared experiences with others. Whether affective or structural, the artist examines and engages all of these reference points to process her own physiological inheritance and operations, then translates the invisible into form.

Shankar’s work grows out of odd amalgams, interpolated and transformed through deeply intuitive gestures. She combines scraps from the studio with new foundations, forming a situation in which creation also implicates re-cycle. This is demonstrated in Coddled & Swaddled: I Have A Tummy Ache, Me Too where the artist has layered paint, paper, and other media all in reference to the body and its environment. The “painting” is done when Shankar is essentially repelled from the process of making, as the conversation between work and artist reaches its natural conclusion. Awareness here breeds an intentionality that Shankar leverages in order to work through personal histories and creative investments, alike. Everything funnels into her compositional system, with exploding tears and intestinal shapes recurring often.

Beyond these readymade gestures, the artist also pulps her own paper by hand, flattening and hardening it on the ground. This intensive and excessive labor cultivates a deep body awareness, which she leverages to further explore viscerality. Shankar mutates any codified craft technique by abandoning fixed rules, instead charting new methods she goes along. Texture becomes a primary register, with compositions that accrete through layers of touch and pressure. This piecemeal process lends to a fragmentary combination of elements, where friction meets meditation.

Swells of pink dominate the older work, allusions to fleshy warmth and visceral frequencies. In these newer pieces, Shankar introduces more blue and cool tones, invoking the body’s largely liquid architecture. The aqueous and rosy shades commingle with earthen ones, denoting a continuum between land and body. Go Easy On Me Baby, for instance, sees amorphous, organ-like forms suspended mid-vortex. Like other works on view, this painting falls into the lineage of artists such as Julie Mehretu, who leverage abstract mapping as a means to collapse internal and external systems. Louise Bourgeois is another figure whose meditations on the body as a vessel of memory and psychic resonance have opened up the space for Shankar to explore similar conceptual terrain.

In her essay “Intensities and Flows” Elizabeth Grosz aptly frames the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as it relates to somatic understanding. She highlights "their notion of the body as a discontinuous, nontotalizable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations.” Fundamentally, Shankar operates according to this model of corporeal flux, applying embodied knowledge, her compositions mapping out internal happenings, from physiological impulses to affective states. She likewise tracks cyclical energies, seeking the different channels and karmic rhythms that comprise a living system. These specific concerns also manifest visually, as the artist’s work often features spiralling forms that echo processes of circulation, accumulation, and release. Mediating both universal and acute experiences, she divines new aesthetic lexicons that upend traditional models of image-making. In fact, she largely denies straightforward representation, moving against cultural demands of total clarification.

Abstraction, for Shankar, is the ultimate format for navigating the unseeable and unspeakable, evoking it all through patterns and forms that unfold intuitively rather than descriptively. It moves beyond mere aesthetic concerns, becoming a language through which the female experience can be articulated. She cites resistance, persistence, and insistence as the means with which one can open up and explore these intangible, corporeal terrains of feeling and memory.