We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shruti Ghatak a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Shruti, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

My very first influences were my mother and my surroundings. She was a musician and a gifted craftperson who introduced me to Batik, embroidery, bandhni and sewing. Those tactile experiences of making something with my hands were somethng I was deeply drawn to. I also grew up in a place surrounded by many terracotta temples with beautiful relief sculptures steeped in ancient mythologies and folklores of India. Those reliefs instilled in me a sense of storytelling, form, and rhythm. These early experiences whether on fabric, sari borders, or temple walls, revealed how visual elements could carry narratives, sparking my lifelong interest in storytelling through art.
As I grew older formal training in painting, sculpture, and even color chemistry later expanded my vocabulary. Looking back, greater exposure to museums, archives, and contemporary practices definately have accelerated my growth. Because access was a major obstacle. Growing up without galleries, museums or art books meant learning was often slow, intuitive, and solitary.
The most essential skills have been observation and persistence: sketching from nature, absorbing mythic narratives, and allowing experimentation to guide me. Technical skills can be taught, but learning to see-to connect the mundane with the mythic-has been the most vital part of my practice.

Shruti, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My creative practice today centers on paintings and terracotta relief sculptures that explore the intersection of mythology, migration, and cultural identity. I often draw inspiration from literature, music, poetry, lyrics, conversation and natural world-both physical and emotional. Forests, rivers, seasonal shifts, birds and animal -all of which find their way into my work as both symbolic and observational elements. Through these motifs, I merge the everyday with the mythic or the mythic with the everyday, creating spaces where personal memory, ancestral traditions, and contemporay life intersect.
It feels good to see how my work bridges ancient storytelling traditions with present-day experiences. Terracotta reliefs conncet me to the lineage of Indian temple art, while painting allows me to expand into broader terrain of human and ecological narratives.
I hope the works can encourage a dialogue between past and present, between different cultures, and between personal and collective narratives. My hope is that viewers recognize themselves within the stories I tell, that they sense how myth and memory live within the most ordinary of moments and how art can make those moments timeless.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

For a thriving creative ecosystem, art needs to be more accesible to everyone. We need to create and cultivate spaces where art can reach the public in diverse ways through many different platforms. Galleries and museums do play a big role but they are intimadating to common public sometimes. And we need to bring art to every level of the society, not just to a segment of it. When art will become part of daily life it can strengthen empathy, collective imagination and hope. Society needs to value art not as a luxury, but as an essential part of human life. This means making arts education accessible to every child from an early age, so children grow up seeing creativity as a natural way of thinking, problem solving and expressing themselves.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the ability to transform ideas, observation and experiences into something that resonates with others. There’s a deep satisfaction in exploring ideas, experimenting with materials, taking risks and ultimately seeing a vision take form.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.shrutighatak.com
• Instagram: @shruti_ghatak

Image Credits

Photo credits:
1. Gesture of faith, oil on canvas, 60×48 in, 2024
Photo by Tatyana and Anthony Monzón

2. Golden hour, acrylic on canvas, 58×40 in, 2024
Photo by Tatyana and Anthony Monzón