Aaditi Joshi’s Recycled Art in Tensile Dimensions

Nature Morte, presents Aaditi Joshi’s first solo showcase in New Delhi with ‘Tensile Dimensions.’ The exhibition will run from September 21st to October 26th from 10 AM to 6 PM. The preview is scheduled for September 20 from 7-9 PM. It highlights her ability to transform recycled plastics—specifically polypropylene bags—into art pieces that blur the lines between painting, sculpture, and textile.

Known for using discarded materials, Joshi’s work tackles pressing environmental concerns while offering a visual interpretation of everyday objects. Her innovative approach turns something as ordinary as construction-site bags into intricate, low-relief compositions, rich with color and texture. These pieces evoke surreal landscapes, encouraging reflection on the beauty, utility, and destructive power of plastics in our modern world.

For a number of years, Aaditi Joshi has made her art exclusively out of recycled plastics. Of course, plastics are now destroying humanity and the planet, choking landfills and seeping into our bloodstreams, but they have also enabled countless benefits and make our modern lives possible. Joshi savours these contradictions. In her newest body of work, the artist has focused on polypropylene bags, these being the white woven bags ubiquitously located at construction sites, used for the storage and transport of sand and concrete. For Joshi, the significance of the polypropylene goes beyond its materiality and functionality. Instead it is a medium for her to convey a free expression of colours and forms.

Joshi dismantles and washes the bags and approaches them as a found textile, now primed for her manipulation. Paint is applied to parts and the material is crafted into a low-relief, undulating surface, redolent of the surface of an alien planet, the ebbs and flows of the typography of the art work emphasised by Joshi’s sensitive application of colours and deft handling of textures. Her compositional approach is both programmatic and spontaneous and the final results are works that defy categorization, synthesising painting, collage, sculpture, and textile art.

About Aaditi Joshi

Aaditi Joshi (born in 1980) occasionally stops on the Mumbai roadside to absorb the surreal landscape before her eyes-enormous hills of discarded plastic form a rugged urban topography. Joshi says that when looking at these materials and understanding the social fallout they cause, she is disturbed but also moved to incorporate them into her artistic practice.

Joshi graduated in Drawings and Painting from L.S. Raheja School of Art, Mumbai, India in 2001. She has showcased her work in the Netherlands, Mumbai, Germany, Boston, Shanghai, California, Tuscany, and Paris.

Image Courtesy – Nature Morte