The Sacred Feminine

Rajeshree’s works are deeply imbued with personal reflections, using self portraits in all her works as an aid to meditate on the macrocosm of the universe through the microcosm of the self. In The Descent, she dwells on the Mesopotamian myth of the queens of heaven and the underworld, Inanna and Ereshkigal respectively. She follows Innana’s symbolic descent, which involves stripping of all the trappings of the ego through the seven gates of hell to visit her widowed sister, Ereshkigal only to be hung to rot. She is then rescued by two androgynous beings, that win her corpse over from Ereshkigal and nurture her back to life. As Inanna ascends, though stripped of all her queenly glory, she has earned the gift of consciousness to discern the true nature of things.
A Tunic for Artemis is a stunning tribute to the goddess of nature and the hunt, drawing strength by encompassing in herself all the mysteries of the natural world that she protects.
In Flying High with Aphrodite, she muses on how this goddess makes us soar in love only to send us crashing like a kite when relationships hit turbulence. Nevertheless, when we fall into deep waters (which is one of the symbols of consciousness) she watches over us as we struggle to emerge once again.
In Hestia Burning, she pays homage to the goddess of the hearth, symbolised here by a spiritual cleansing by fire and in Hera -Rising Strong she keeps a watchful eye on Zeus.

Excerpted from the catalogue raisonné of the exhibition: The Sacred Feminine (2018), curated by Miriam Koshy-Sukhija