Under the Skin
Sneh Mehta
Courtesy of the Artist.
The work of Kenyan-born British artist Sneh Mehta (b.1954) is now going through a significant mutation, both in terms of aesthetics and content. Oscillating between painting and sculpture, digital photography, film and animation, the work manages to retain a powerful link to Mehta’s dominant subject-matter: the biological mysteries of human life. The new work healthily incorporates what came before it, and there is no brutal jettisoning of the old in favour of a redemptive new.
Ellen Mara De Watcher, ‘SnehMehta: Morphosis’, contemporary issue no.70, 2005, p. 70-71
My work focuses on the intersection between art and science. It is concerned with the metaphors that arise within scientific iconography. The internal landscape of the visceral body has been made visible through magnification by the microscope and other visual technologies available today. These images have entered the cultural and artistic field and continue to develop into alternative meanings.
My work compares the similarities between scientific icons, cultural artefacts and natural forms. The structure of the human growth hormone somatotrophin evokes the image of patterned beaded embroidery. Similarly, the photograph of the human egg cell resembles the image of a planet in our galaxy, its structure echoes the skeletal form of a football. The double helix of DNA and its genetic code, represented by the four letters GATC, have become the semiotics of life forms.
Making connections between these shared patterns across the organic and the inorganic is the basis of my work. The chiasmic intertwining and reciprocity between the ‘Flesh’ of the body and the ‘Flesh’ of the world, a theory of intersubjectivity as argued by Merleau-Ponty, finds resonance within my artistic practice.
The ‘third image’ works are photographic images produced by multiple projections of my own paintings and drawings to create a projected collage, producing a third impression. They may create the impression of being a digitally manipulated image but are in fact manually produced.
As Quantum and Relativity theories have shown, the universe and all within it are a dynamic inseparable whole. I consider my works to be metaphorical statements that unfold and reveal a way of perceiving ourselves as a part of this dynamic whole.
