Drawing Room: Why Olympe Ramakrishna is a fan of Rithika Merchant’s art
What exactly is ‘women’s work’? Is femininity in art meant to play out only as ‘delicate’, ‘intricate’ and less visible labour? How does the Indian contemporary female identity find a place in art after a long history of being shut out? It was while seeking these answers as part of my practice that I discovered the work of Rithika Merchant.
Many artists translate myths and symbols into visual stories, but Merchant’s versions are specifically about the feminine, via vibrant, even otherworldly, imagery. The 39-year-old artist, an alumna of the Parsons School of Design in New York, paints serpents, eyes, orbs, fish and strange anthropomorphic hybrid creatures. They could belong to folklore and tales from any part of the world, and they could reference anything from tribal art, Mughal miniatures, colonial botanical drawings, popular art of the 17th century, embroidery, and the natural world.
I discovered her through the 2025 work The Flowers We Grew, a gigantic embroidered textile installation that feels like a space you enter rather than an image you look at. Merchant created it in collaboration with 306 artisans, primarily women, at the Chanakya School of Craft. It was commissioned to be the backdrop for the Christian Dior Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2025 runway show in Paris and was later presented at the city’s Musée Rodin.
The work consists of nine watercolour paintings, which the artisans have worked over with embroidery, spending 144,000 hours on the work. So, it isn’t wholly Merchant’s labour. The act of collective embroidering turns the work into a shared, feminine gesture rather than a solitary one.
Colours of all manner abound – both of creatures in their natural state as well as fictional beings who bear patterns and designs unique to themselves. There’s a lot going on but the artwork invites you to slow down, inspect and question what you’re seeing.
It’s striking. Fantastical creatures preside over a large and bountiful copse of trees and plants. Some are fierce, others benign. The sky changes colour as it moves from day to night as the sun, moon, shooting stars, constellations and planets come alive. The natural beauty is inspired by that of Kerala, where her maternal family is from.
Merchant has credited her childhood in Kerala and the stories of the women in her life, particularly her grandmother who began a milk cooperative, as the major influence behind this work. She depicts her ancestors as confident bird-human hybrids, captured performing mundane acts such as eating a mango or resting in a lotus pond.
For me, women’s work in art symbolises the deep dedication of time, attention and care, another form of intricate but largely invisible labour that women have always done. In Merchant’s 2020 work Hyperlife, a creature made of water, with roots for eyes and leaves for a mouth, performs a strange dance, as its limbs decay into black nothingness. It’s a comment on the worrying fate of humanity when it squanders away its most precious resource – water. In ‘Inner Sanctum’, made in 2022, an embryonic bird woman hides within the belly of a rotund fish, in an ode to humanity’s mythical beginnings. Yet, before assigning any strict definitions, take a moment to think about the mercurial quality of Merchant’s work – it could mean many things or nothing at all.
Olympe Ramakrishna is a Franco-Indian visual artist who combines painting, textile and embroidery to explore representations of femininity.
