Krishi Shah

Krishi Shah (b. 2000) is a Mumbai-based visual artist currently pursuing her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London. She received her BFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

Her practice explores the sacred intersection of nature, spirituality, and selfhood, drawing on Jain philosophy, ecological consciousness, and personal memory. While earlier traditions often envisioned humans as part of the landscape, Shah’s recent work reflects on a painful reversal: nature—once expansive and alive—has been reduced to ornament or backdrop, while human desire, consumption, and dominance have taken center stage.

Through symbolic, dreamlike landscapes inspired by miniature painting and animation, Shah investigates this shifting relationship. Her compositions become meditative spaces where the viewer encounters both sanctuary and rupture—portals that hold together reverence for the natural world and a critique of its exploitation. Informed by Jain principles of ahimsa (non-violence), aparigraha (non-possession), and vairagya (detachment), her work questions contemporary habits of overconsumption and the ecological losses they cause.

By reframing nature as both mirror and threshold, Shah’s paintings urge a reconsideration of our place within the environment—not as conquerors, but as coexisting beings. Her practice embodies a quiet resistance, offering viewers a space to pause, reflect, and imagine futures of renewed balance and reverence.