Garden of inspiration

Pooja Dhingra

Alibaug Afternoon

Passion fruit and Hibiscus cake

If I had to describe the flavour profile of Kunaal’s garden, I’d say it was full of zest, infused with floral notes, mellow fragrances, hints of citrus, and a subtle underlying sweetness.  Translating the energy of the landscape into an edible microcosm, I ended up with a very light and refreshing hibiscus and passion fruit cake. The effortless, almost accidentally opulent, quality of the space is embodied through the pastry garnish — dried flowers and decadent macaroons carrying bespoke flowery prints strewn across a soft pastel surface. I like to imagine the cake being devoured at a Mad Hatter’s tea party on a hot summer day in this tropical wonderland tucked away in Alibaug.

Suhasini Kejriwal

Birdsong series v 

Acrylic paint and paper on canvas

66” x 42” inches

My response to Kunaal’s beautiful intervention in Alibaug’s landscape is a rich, painterly, and layered profusion of colours, shapes, and textures, all densely compressed in an imaginary landscape of my own. Although my response is largely poetic, it includes some actual references to his work, like the flowing pink and white bougainvillea and the delicate mango blossoms that balance the structures of the beautiful ferns and the sturdy, large leaves of the Elephant Ear plant.

Samanta Batra Mehta

Enchanted Monsoon: A Garden of Sensual Delights

Inks on archival paper

Kunaal Maniar’s landscaped garden is a transformative force, enveloping the boundaries between the earth, home and sky. My work, Enchanted Monsoon: A Garden of Sensual Delights, celebrates the sensuality of this tropical garden, the freshness of the monsoon-green, and the intoxicating rhythms of nature. This work imagines this garden as both a physical space and a metaphorical realm, filled with enchantment, discovery, and symbiotic dialogue between the natural world, the living space and the imagination. Through this work, the viewer is transported into a hypnotic state, where the senses are awakened redolent with fragrance, mystery and magic.

Sakshi Gupta

And everything close to my face is stone

Basalt stone

Left Shoe 13” x 11” x 5.5”
Right Shoe 14” x 9” x 4.4”

Materialising the fleeting odyssey of walking through this world, I rendered a pair of shoes in stone — unmoving, yet shaped by transience. Worn out and weighed down, they seem to carry the load of embodied experiences and endless deliberations on life’s enigmas. Laced tightly, the shoes hold personal imprints and echo elapsed realities. The stone itself, found resting in Kunaal’s landscape, has its own lived history as a colonial vestige — some burdens we choose, others we inherit and carry forward. The work’s unfinished quality recalls mysteries lurking in the garden of life — puzzles that bog one down or become a joy to unravel.

Hanut Singh

Bejewelled Leaves

I traversed its secret nooks and seductive corners, eavesdropping on intimate exchanges between light and colour. Stillness and motion seemed engrossed in witty banter.

Consumed by the lust of a jeweller, I stole geometries from Kunaal’s gorgeous garden sanctuary and planted them in an ear-scape. In true Edenesque fashion, rubies recall the lure of low-hanging fruit; emerald suspensions echo the whispers of rustling leaves; and diamond venation sparkles in the sun.

Rajesh Pratap Singh

Day Tripping

Sheer: Machine-embroidered bird motifs in fluorescent colours

Bolster: Hand-woven linen with fluorescent stripes

Bedcover: Linen with hand-quilting in a diamond pattern, highlighted by florescent green accents

Kunaal’s landscape was a repository of earthly delights. Quite organically, this space pulled me away from an anthropocentric lens and I found myself thinking from the perspective of the tropical fauna around me.

Inspired by the garden’s diverse occupancy, I began to conceive a daybed as more than just a human siesta spot. I imagined how it might operate as a gossip forum for parakeets, a playscape for sparrows, and a panchayat assembly point for the bulbuls and mynas. There’s a vivid image in my mind of these chatty bird flocks fluttering and flying off the fabric drapes as they sense human presence.

Biraaj Dodiya

The Edge of Things

Oil on linen, 18” x 14”

I would almost say they save me, and daily — Mary Oliver (When I Am Among the Trees)

The beautiful Alibaug light and Kunaal’s interventions in the landscape led me to thinking about the garden — garden as threshold, a breathing body, a quiet world between worlds. Trees have their rooted secrets, their laughter and their long arms. This intimate, ‘torso-sized’ painting was developed in response, through an intuitive process of constant accretion and excavation of paint, the surface flickering between depth and imagined shadow. Treading over the idea of air, land, and home, the worked surface begins to generate new landscapes, almost always on the brink of losing form and familiarity. Is it erosion or bruise, shoulder or cliff? Are they entries or exits, was it soil or flesh? Is there a possibility of a cartography in paint that invents non-navigable terrains?