Rithika Merchant

[Rithika Merchant](https://www.rithikamerchant.com/) Exploring and Making Multilayered Myths Rithika Merchant’s art begins in her hands. She grew up reaching into the world, into honey jars, into mud, into anything that let her feel the truth of the material. Curiosity for her was never abstract; it was tactile, direct, and driven by the need to understand substances by touching them. That instinct became the foundation of her myth-making: the world must be encountered before it can be imagined. Her first creative language was the camera. She used it not to document but to investigate, pressing the lens close to plants, to textures, to things adults assumed children would find unpleasant. The camera became a vessel for disappearing and reappearing, a tool for understanding illusion from the inside. She watched early special-effects programs with fascination, realizing that magic was engineered: thunder from a metal sheet, floods from miniature sets, explosions from cleverly staged me