Chthonic Whispers: Anushka Rustomji's Arboretum

Hassan Tahir Latif

Our managing editor’s short rumination on visual artist Anushka Rustomji’s most recent body of work, A Floral Arboretum.

Have you ever looked at a tree? Really looked at it. Walked up close and observed its roots becoming one with the ground, occasionally jutting out above through cracked dirt. Have you stood still and followed its strong trunk reaching towards the sky. Stolid; sturdy; silent. The branches spreading out in every direction—dressed or naked. Have you looked at it closer, still? Stepped right up to it and seen the texture of the bark, strangely twisted knots, like scrunched up faces. The sighing and susurrations, as life emanates from it, a kindred energy, a familiarity.

At the thesis display in Tollington Market, NCA

Closer, still and the tree is alive; it looks back at you.

The feeling of being watched never goes away. 

Our affinity with the plant world is deep; deep enough for it to have featured prominently in numerous creation myths across time and cultures—from the Biblical Eden tree to the Norse Yggdrasil; the Zoroastrian Tree of Immortality to the Hindu Asvattha. Folklore is also replete with woodland creatures and spirits of the trees: from Greek Dryads all the way down to Tolkien’s Ents inspired by Japanese Jinmenju. 

This connection with the plant world, with trees, the symbiotic relationship with human life (and death)—and creation myths associated with these cycles—is what Anushka Rustomji explores in her latest body of work A Floral Arboretum, presented as part of her NCA Master’s Degree Show. 

Comprised of four large graphite on canvas drawings, the work depicts a self-contained mythology and is a staggering departure in scale from Rustomji’s previous work. She relates that the work is “inspired by the Bundahishn, a Pahlavi era text (which is a translation from much earlier scripts pertaining loosely to Zoroastrian creation stories). The drawings depict one of the cycles of the creation of man. In this creation myth, man was created as two beings, Mashya and Mashyana, both growing out of a rhubarb plant.”

Borne/Bud (I) by Anushka Rustomji (graphite on canvas, 2025)

Rustomji’s take on this myth plays out in a loose triptych, Borne/Bud, where we see two amorphous beings slowly emerge from dense plantation. Indistinguishable at first from the fronds, leaves and stems surrounding them (Borne/Bud I), they gradually take form (Borne/Bud II)—spines, hands and ears become visible, albeit melded together; eventually, they become two distinct humanoid figures sitting amongst the plants (Borne/Bud III). Both figures are turned away from us, their expressions not available to us. 

Yet, their apprehension is felt. It seeps out of the canvas and engulfs you with a dread bordering on the existential. As knotted stems and vines turn into knuckles and fingers, holding an unformed head in them (I), you almost expect a scream to erupt, not unlike a newborn human entering the world or a mythical Mandrake root when pulled out of its earthy home. Rustomji’s humanoids seem to understand that they have been cleaved from the spirit world and thrust into a decaying material world, where their own habitat is slowly being consumed by capitalist greed and destruction. 

Creation myths get their fair share of attention in mythology and folklore; destruction myths not so much—perhaps, because we want to avoid that conversation for as long as we can. In creating her mythology, Rustomji effectively focuses on both. The fourth piece, the pièce de résistance in my opinion, addresses this head on. Bough/Bone is the largest canvas and in one solitary statement confronts us with everything that creation is not: death, decay and destruction. While the triptych depicts flourishing plant life, Bough/Bone is an amalgam of gnarled roots, withering vines and skeletal remains.

At first glance, and even thereafter, it reminded me of otherworldly forests from science-fiction: Vandermeer’s in Annihilation; Miyazaki’s in Nausicaä . There was also a hint of Corey’s revolting organic mass created by the proto-molecule, a hive-sentient organism that threatens to end humanity in the Expanse series. Rustomji resists this link to science-fiction; but isn’t all good science-fiction on par with ancient mythology? Their concerns remain the same: the life-decay cycles of humanity and the limits of our interaction with the natural world around us. In Bough/Bone the hybridised messy mass of roots and bones seems suspended in mid-air, a single Lovecraftian entity. The longer you stare at it, the more the piece draws you in—the negative space around it a counter to the dense foliage of the triptych. The closer you look, the more you see: a limb, a disembodied ear, maybe even an eye staring back at you, luring you in. 

Hybrid creations and mystical mythological forms are not new to Rustomji’s practice. In fact, they appear central to it. She routinely draws from fables and lore, cosmological entities and natural organic material, creating her own tales with each new-fashioned form. In A Floral Arboretum, though, she expands beyond her usual expectations: in scale, in form, in medium. This made her body of work a favourite and arguably the standout piece from the year’s presentation. 

Bough/Bone by Anushka Rustomji (graphite on canvas, 2025)

Arboretum may have been comprised of just four pieces, but they draw on Rustomji’s earlier works. 

During a private visit before the show, I was able to view a few process drawings: fabulist clams with many legs; mystical waves and half-formed humanoids; all of them informed the final pieces on display. 

Viewing the four canvases at once, you have the sense of a balance between light and dark; birth and death; life and decay. Interestingly though, the longer you stay with the pieces, the more you appreciate Rustomji’s singular take on the matter. There’s a ferocity in the triptychs, despite their lush plantscapes: we are reminded forcefully that creation is in its essence a calamitous process; birth is a violence rendered on the soul as it is wrenched from the Great Beyond. Whereas, the Chthonic fusion of bone and tree, with its gory aperture into death, holds space for a long-awaited exhalation, as you wait to be received by the Great Beyond, finally rid of the atrocities of living a life. 

True to form, Rustomji’s A Floral Arboretum, weaves a myth of its own. 

One that excavates ancient belief, extracts it from specific religious leanings, repurposes and presents it as a more universal story; one that addresses the alarm bells ringing all around us, exhorting us to reconsider and recalibrate our relationship with the natural world, lest we all get subsumed by the riot and rot of skeletal trees. 

Photos of the artwork by Usman Javaid, courtesy of the artist; photo at Tollington by the author.