Matrika
Solo Exhibition
New Art Exchange, Nottingham
May 2026 - September 2026
Photos by Hannah Pye
In Hindu cosmology, Matrika refers to the divine mothers, forms of generative, protective, and transformative feminine energy associated with creation, protection, and cyclical renewal. Patel draws on this lineage not as illustration but as a living framework: Matrika is always becoming, always transforming, as matter changes in the world. The exhibition unfolds from her.
The work is rooted in material processes of repetition, layering, and accumulation, and explores time as cyclical, with past, present, and future held together rather than understood as separate. Hindu mythology shapes this thinking throughout. Kali embodies destruction and transformation, ferocity and maternal protection. Sita, daughter of the earth, rises from ancestral soil as a symbol of renewal. These are not historical references but active ones, shaping how the works are made and what they reach toward.
Several works were informed by a residency in Patel’s ancestral village Sagra, in Gujarat, India, where time spent alongside women whose lives are shaped by continual labour, in the fields, in the home, in sustaining family and land, proved formative. Connections formed across difference: two women shaped by different geographies yet bound by shared ancestry, body, and land. The residency deepened a sense that knowledge is carried through the body, through objects, and across generations, an understanding that runs through the sculptural works, the installations, and the sound piece throughout the show.
The sculptures assemble domestic vessels, bells, ceramic forms, and found objects into presences that hold memory and ritual in their physicality. The paintings, a recent and significant development in Patel’s practice, reach outward into cosmology, atmosphere, and the vastness of the universe. Across scales, from the intimate object to the expansive painted field, the exhibition holds to a conviction drawn from Indian philosophy: that the deeply personal and the infinitely vast are not separate, but mirror each other.
This exhibition is a space where myth and lived experience meet, where memory, land, and imagination remain in motion, and where worlds are continually made and remade.