Prakriti (प्रकृति)
What does a tree feel when it is cut down? In Prakriti, Jai Zharotia gives the forest a face and a voice, and paints against deforestation and the damage we are doing to the climate.
For Jai Zharotia nature was never scenery. A woman’s face looks out through a thicket of green leaves; a tree grows a human head; a tree of life rises in blue and red from a pot; two bare trees stand alone against black. In the gold-ground drawings of 2018, a man raises his arm against a tree, and a figure stands beside a trunk with an axe.
Prakriti, nature, turns his belief that every being has feelings into a warning. If the tree can feel, then cutting it is not a neutral act. The people around the forest sometimes wear animal faces, his way of showing the instinct that drives our behaviour today.
The series grew from a lifetime of drawing from village life: cows, birds, the trees he sketched as a student. It asks the viewer to see the natural world as he did, as a community of beings rather than a resource.
“Everything, whether it is a living man or animal, or non-living, such as wood, stone or leaves, is equal and has emotions like me.”Jai Zharotia
Works from this series will be added soon.