Artists find inspiration in the animal kingdom

Artists turn to animal motifs to balance the pictorial space, depict emotions, or to create a portal to the uncanny

- Shweta Upadhyay

Some years ago, Bharti Kher wanted to see the heart of a sperm whale. She couldn't find a photograph online or in libraries—which came as a surprise since the contemporary artist, like most of us, thought there's nothing one can't find online anymore. Whales, she learned, sink to the bottom of the sea when they die, and the bodies are not preserved even if they die on shore. Her quest to see the massive creature's heart became the subject of her 2007 work An Absence of Assignable Cause, which depicts a two-chambered, red-and-turquoise heart in fibreglass decorated with her signature bindis. "The idea was that we need the beating heart of this incredible creature to heal the world."

Kher often uses animal forms in her works that contemplate ecology, myth, gender and the body. In The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own (2006), a female white elephant, covered in white snake-shaped bindis, slumps to the floor in death throes, signifying human folly and hubris that leads to ecological disaster. "For me, animals are both the motif and the medium," says Kher.

Like Kher, several contemporary artists draw inspiration from the animal world. Animals become totems for environmental destruction, urbanization, policy failure, migration, loss of tradition and history, even conflict and war. A drowning elephant was part of Sheba Chhachhi's Water Diviner (2008), an installation to comment on the pollution of the Yamuna. Amitesh Shrivastava uses feral brush strokes to evoke fur and the sense of lurking animals in his semi-abstract works. The presence of animals in artwork is never accidental, unlike an encounter with a wild creature in real life.