Exoskeleton, gouache, watercolor, ink and paper, 2024.
Contemporary artist Rishika Merchant focuses on constructing complex visual cosmologies. She uses watercolor, gouache, and collage to develop a symbolic language that shapes common stories of nature, cosmology, and humanity. Her work moves between myth and speculation, using storytelling as a framework to reflect time and space in relation to humanity.
Her latest series is fruit and bone pillarextends this exploration to a fully realized cosmology. It feels both ancient and speculative, rooted in deep time yet oriented toward possible futures. “fruit and bone pillar “This is the fifth part of a continuous world-building mythology that unfolds across five interconnected works,” Merchant tells My Modern Met. In earlier works, her characters look for answers in the sky, the stars, and the knowledge of their ancestors. Here they start building. The question shifts from how to understand collapse to how to build again.
Throughout these compositions, life exists at the threshold of becoming. Merchant uses the concept of primordial origins not as a strictly scientific framework, but as a poetic and metaphysical proposition. Bones turn into fruit, structures yield to growth, and inert matter gathers latent vitality. Her hybrid being, neither fully human nor fully other, functions as an intermediary that suspends distinctions between organism and environment, body and universe. “I have my own dictionary of symbols and creatures that I use in my work. […] It’s a symbol that everyone can recognize,” she explains, emphasizing her intention to create figures that transcend fixed identities and encourage projection.
Merchant interweaves organic and built forms, suggesting biological and engineered survival systems. “These works propose unique avenues for building and sustaining new worlds,” Merchant said, pointing to ideas such as artificial pollination and self-organizing ecosystems inspired by ant colonies. She draws mythical and speculative structures that reflect ancient cosmologies and imagined futures.
Nature fixes this cosmology not as a background but as a generative force. “Nature is the common thread that connects all my work and the world,” says Merchant. She reflects the internal logic of living systems, where growth and decline proceed in cycles rather than in a straight line. title, fruit and bone pillarholds this duality in tension, proposing a world where nourishment and structure, ephemerality and durability are mutually maintained.
Merchant bases her work on a continuous meditation on time and change. She engages directly with the ecological realities of the Anthropocene and its uncertain aftermath, imagining a future in which we must begin again. “I believe that essentially everything is cyclical,” she reflects. “And this body of work considers how past ways of thinking and being can be reimagined for a new life.”
What emerges is not a utopia but a proposition, a vision of life guided by systems that remain spiritual and ecological, reorganized through interdependence rather than extraction. The world of merchants is not settled in a fixed destination. They evolve as living diagrams, maps of existence, that invite the viewer to consider existence beyond the limits of the present.
Rithika Merchant creates immersive worlds that blend mythology, nature, and speculative characters.
Observatory, gouache, watercolor, ink and paper, 2025.
Aerial Superstructures I, gouache, watercolor, ink and paper, 2023.
fruit and bone pillar Explore cycles of growth and decline through hybrid functions and organic structures.
Regolith, gouache, watercolor and ink on paper, 2023.
Silo, gouache, watercolor, ink and paper, 2023.
Her intricate watercolors, gouaches, and collages visualize a posthuman cosmology where life and space intersect.
Installation view, pillars of fruit and bones, 2025.
Installation view, pillars of fruit and bones, 2025.
Rithika Merchant: Website | Instagram
My Modern Met has given permission to publish Tarq’s photo.
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