The imaginative botanist who stirs emotions through her botanical sculptures and reshapes their acquired meanings

Born and raised in Mumbai, Priyanka Shah creates botanical sculptures that transcend their learned meanings and instead engage with the mind's deep conditioning. Titled Fantasy Botanicals - here familiar and unfamiliar elements from nature are taken out of their designated context and sculpted with newer meanings. Central to her art, Priyanka frequently forages for exotic flowers and dry foliage and maneuvers around their ephemeral nature. Then each element is elegantly arranged to exude many sentiments - sometimes to elicit raw and unpretentious emotions like lust between lovers, or sometimes the pacifying nature of meditation. What began as a 100-day challenge for the botanist on Instagram, to design her own plants has paved the way for collaborations on several projects too. Fantasy Botanicals has created elegant yet evocative sculptures for people across diverse creative disciplines - rom founding chefs at the Danda food project to Indian designers such as Payal Singhal. Priyanka also runs a multi-disciplinary practice called Studio Lalala that focuses on communicating brand stories through photoshoots, visual merchandising, and installations. Her works are met with an element of surprise; once their artistic making settles into the eyes, each element eventually compels us to question the semblance of nature - paving the way for an evolving set of perspectives and aesthetic sensibilities.