Rithika Merchant’s art begins in her hands. She grew up reaching into the world, into honey jars, into mud, into anything that let her feel the truth of the material. Curiosity for her was never abstract; it was tactile, direct, and driven by the need to understand substances by touching them. That instinct became the foundation of her myth-making: the world must be encountered before it can be imagined.
Her first creative language was the camera. She used it not to document but to investigate, pressing the lens close to plants, to textures, to things adults assumed children would find unpleasant. The camera became a vessel for disappearing and reappearing, a tool for understanding illusion from the inside. She watched early special-effects programs with fascination, realizing that magic was engineered: thunder from a metal sheet, floods from miniature sets, explosions from cleverly staged mechanics. Illusion, she learned, is built, material, deliberate, and demanding.
This insight threaded itself into her current practice, where photography and sculpture fold into one another. Her father, a mechanical engineer, shared her fascination with how materials move, transform, and carry force. Their conversations taught her that the world has an infrastructure – viscosity, flow, pressure – and that those physical laws have poetic consequences. Much of her work operates in that seam, where engineering and enchantment mirror each other.
Merchant creates pieces that begin as flat images, then explode into layered forms, plans and counterplans separated, reassembled, and resurrected into three-dimensional bodies. Clay is pinched, molded, then cast in resin so convincingly that viewers feel a “healthy confusion,” unsure how such softness exists inside such hardness. She uses silicone, resin, clay, photography, and digital images as if they were different dialects of the same language, each capable of revealing another layer of the myth.
Ambiguity is her chosen terrain. Not linguistic ambiguity, but material ambiguity, the kind that destabilizes perception and makes the familiar newly strange. Her sculptures ask the viewer to reconsider what is solid, what is fluid, what is alive, and what is engineered. They create the precise tension a myth requires: a suspension of certainty that opens space for meaning.
The coherence of her practice is composed of childhood tactility, engineered illusions, the phenomenology of substances, and the sculptural resurrection of flat images into living forms. Merchant builds myths not from symbols but from materials themselves, shaping worlds where touch, curiosity, and ambiguity become the material of coherence – myths built from the substance of lived experience rather than symbol alone.
