Home-sick: Garima Gupta

On Garima's first day at the Harvard Herbaria, Anthony had laid out a few specimens for her to look at. Among them was Rheum australe. She remembers being struck by the extraordinary detail of each part—the flowers dried into tiny black specks, the large leaves with their veins standing sharply against the paper. She didn’t quite know what to make of it, so she drew it in her small green notebook.

That drawing became the first note of Home-sick. And quite unwittingly, this artwork became the first in the Home-sick series.

Known colloquially as Padamchal, Rheum australe is a powerful medicinal plant, widely used across the Himalayan belt for a range of ailments. As Garima began travelling through the region, she kept returning to that specimen. The stratified matter of the higher altitudes—the layers of rock, soil, fossils, and plants—began to resemble it: meandering, rising and falling, dense in some places and almost skeletal in others. At times, the landscape itself seemed like a specimen: an accumulation of what the Himalayas have been, and a record of oceanic matter from the ancient Tethys Ocean.

As far back as Garima can remember, she and her family always had a bottle of Aconite tincture at home. In homeopathy, highly diluted preparations of the poisonous Aconitum napellus plant are used for conditions including sudden anxiety, fever, and inflammation. Aconitum heterophyllum, while belonging to the same genus, is considered less toxic, though it too contains toxic compounds. 

This particular specimen from the Herbaria drew her in because of its crumpled, folded state. Even mangled, every part of the plant remained recognisable—the stem, leaves, and flowers holding their distinct forms. It reminded her of a fossil: a record of a living thing, altered by time, far from its original geography, its colours now oxidised, yet retaining its identity in the marks and traces left behind.

The work depicts the blue-violet flowers of Aconitum heterophyllum, a Himalayan plant whose medicinal use centres on its root. Traditionally known as Ativisha, the root has been used in Ayurvedic and Himalayan medicine for fever and digestive ailments, while the flower offers the visible form through which the plant is encountered and identified.

Rock crumbs dribbling down a mountain indicate that it is still rising.  A thought, an idea, drifts into reality through forests, through the porosity of topographies and through time in landscapes. Invisible forces work continuously to create matter and elevation; fossilised ammonites from a past ocean floor are now found in the bare, cold Himalayan desert at the high altitudes of the Spiti Valley. This is where Garima Gupta first seeded thoughts of Home-sick, in the barren vastness while hitch-hiking her way across Himachal Pradesh and its Himalayan belt. In awe of the beauty there, Gupta could not stop at sight alone. With a researcher’s mind unable to settle for just surface-level satisfaction, she let the project grow beyond the seeds planted during her initial travels in 2022 and 2023. Drawn to the way tectonic plates move, she knew that everything that surrounded her had risen through invisible forces from zero sea-level. A fellowship at Harvard University (2023) that followed this trip led Gupta to the herbaria and their archives. It was here that the shift internalised for her.

Before plants, Gupta’s research and artistic practice were centred on the commodification of wildlife. Land and life were commodities whose records lived in letters, files and clandestine stories. For instance, tigers were traded across borders, and confiscated carcasses indicated a demand for them. Land claimed through old records suggested a desire for ownership. The trade in plants, however, was rarely recorded. They traversed boundaries according to need and purpose, without hesitation or permission. Yet, when Gupta began her research in the Harvard herbaria with a category titled Economic Plants of the Trans-Himalayan Belt, she found Himalayan herbs and plants mentioned in Greek medical history and in the journals of Portuguese travellers to Mumbai. India’s medicinal herbs have been traded without official documentation for centuries. They were listed as economical because of their role in global trade for medicinal purposes. Gupta honed her research to widely harvested plants, some of which are still used by pharmaceutical companies today.

On returning to India from her time at Harvard, Gupta’s research shifted beyond trade and towards a curiosity about the knowledge that rests within species. In this realm, the semblance of meaning and linearity of time began to slip. Beginning with questions about forest foods as cures, Gupta’s inquisitiveness pushed her research to think about the structure of understanding information and how it is carried forward across generations. This relates not only to an awareness of recognition but also to one of intuitive knowing. She continued to focus on the trans-Himalayan region, while travelling across Ladakh, Sikkim and Kalimpong (West Bengal) to encounter medicinal plants, their harvesters, shamans and Amchis, a community of traditional healers of holistic and herbal medicines belonging to the Himalayan regions.

Through her research, Gupta discovered that the human brain can be pushed towards new learning at a steady, incremental pace. She applied this to the expansion of her own thinking and ability, challenging herself to move away from being primarily a studio practitioner. While her travels had taken her across the world and down rabbit holes of information, this time she used her body as an axis to course-correct her thinking and returned to creating with a renewed perspective on form and colour. In developing her current work, Gupta pushed herself into a new language outside of drawing. She cut up big pieces of paper to learn what it might mean to create intuitively with it. Spilling pigment across these cut up pieces was as daunting as trying to understand how a forest holds answers and medicines for human ailments. Large colour collages are stitched together to evoke dried plant memories. These specimens combine the artist’s discoveries across the trans-Himalayan region with those that piqued her attention in the herbaria, all related to a body’s healing knowledge derived from shamans and locals, and carried forward in unspoken ways.

Home-sick is a collection of drawings and collages that play with time through colour pigments that blur the definition of lines, with an affinity to the placebo effect. It is a homecoming to the body from which we often disengage ourselves. The species in this exhibition are drawn from the Harvard herbaria. The colours in which they are represented are oxidised versions taken from the herbarium archive and differ from those of the living plants. Here, dried residues become Gupta’s starting point. The archive generates a rearrangement of facts, which Gupta uses to extend the connotations of her work. For instance, a yellow-grey specimen Aconitum heterophyllum, collected in Shimla in 1944 represents a now endangered plant owing to overharvesting and habitat loss. Used for treating digestive issues and respiratory ailments, it sits alongside the red and grey Rheum australe. Both plants are used to treat stomach ailments and are valuable, endangered species; the latter was catalogued in the 1800s. Three smaller works that spill into shades of grey pigment again reference an endangered species. Neopicrorhiza scrophulariiflora also addresses abdominal, bile and liver issues, while a further cluster of smaller works is a study of Delphinium vestitum, a highly toxic cure for inflamed bodies and wounds. In these explorations, Gupta details the current status of these plants as listed in the Herbaria. Yet, similar to her research, these details are symptomatic of a reading that returns to her field trips. 

For Gupta, these field trips are no longer about control. She has arrived at a point of detachment, perhaps as a coping mechanism for grief. The uninterrupted stream of knowledge and data she gathered as a researcher begins to catch up with her, along with the hope that knowing will be a solution to a real-life crisis. However, with time, Gupta realised that it is intuitive awareness, rather than gathered knowledge, that can decipher the situations she finds herself in. She describes her experience as allowing the world to happen around her without questioning it. The loss of control with pigments on paper is linked to a loosening grip on gestures, which she now allows her brain to receive from the outside. Form begins to emerge through instinct, and the memory that arrives becomes one of discovery rather than a past imprint.

Intuition grew from the artist’s realisation of her body lagging behind her mind as she entered her forties. Looking beyond the surface of her body, Gupta turned her attention to the nature around her. Her subsequent meetings with the Amchis and shamans were not those of a patient but were driven by curiosity about the question: How does a plant know how to cure me? 

Shamanistic answers, entangled with quantum physics, looked both at and away from Western medicine, listening instead to the body’s need to heal with plants. In modern medicine, the symptom is separated from its cause when looking for a cure. Healing becomes a prescription allotted to a brief segment of time; it deciphers the ailment, often without addressing the root cause. In Gupta’s experience with shamanistic knowledge, she realised that to return to the body, one’s home, there is a need to cultivate an interspecies understanding of and with plants. It is a cure for being Home-sick. 

The consciousness that arose from this journey has led Gupta to shift her thinking about subjectivity and interspecies communication. For instance, when Gupta thinks about how bats navigate through sonar or how owls hunt with precision by sound, she observes that every species, including human beings, enters the realm of interconnectedness that transmits knowledge in a field of intuitions. Gupta seeks answers about how humans, during their evolution, learnt which plants to eat in forests to cure themselves. How has this knowledge been preserved and passed on, and how does a plant know how to heal a body? These questions have taken centre stage in her research as she contextualises her body and internal organs.

The answers to her questions to plants arrived in the form of spirits and energies rooted in the land and forests where she was in with the healers. There was no longer a separation between symptom and cure. Understanding healing requires that the body needs to be at home with itself, to then connect with its immediate surroundings and in turn confer with the Amchis and shamans.

Considering the gesture as a condition for healing brings the placebo into play. Gupta delves into how a brain transmutes the data that a herb is medicinal, together with its recognition of the environment in which a medicine is administered. The healer’s ritual before the medicine is received is itself a conditioning gesture for healing and thereby for cure. Gupta’s preoccupation shifted from documenting moments to examining how her own work separates itself from a literal representation and instead becomes a facet of representation.

This facet can be looked at in two ways. The first is as a signifier. In semiotics, the study of signs, the signifier is the literal object or medicine that triggers the cure through the symptom, or index, of the Shaman’s gesture. Gupta’s paintings work towards a reversal of the sign in what Roland Barthes calls the second order, or myth. Her depiction of these flowering medicinal plants moves away from literal description and instead addresses the second way: the environment. Understanding healing as an environmental response rather than an isolated gesture brings a larger forest and ecosystem into play. Gupta’s research on trade histories finds its way back into these works through her discoveries about the future of healing, in which even large pharmaceutical companies have entered these forests to develop medicines. 

As Gupta continues to develop her research, she surrenders to a consciousness that flows without boundaries. For her, knowledge transfer takes a primary place in interspecies communication, which is driven by intuition beyond reason. The daunting fear of knowing without spoken language or text, without a library or an archive, is a return to knowing oneself through the body, a portal to understanding a universe that is symptomatic of both sickness and cure. Home-sick arises from a wandering away from the primary home, the body, but it is also a return to that home, with an understanding of internal listening that cures through gestures, listens through energies and sustains through acceptance.