Aaditi Joshi (born in 1980) occasionally stops on the Mumbai roadside to absorb the surreal landscape before her eyes-enormous hills of discarded plastic form a rugged urban topography. Joshi says that when looking at these materials and understanding the social fallout they cause, she is disturbed but also moved to incorporate them into her artistic practice.

India has a history of disposable culture. For generations, roadside vendors and food stalls served tea in kulhars, simple, unglazed, and fired terra-cotta vessels.

After consuming their contents, customers would toss the vessels onto the ground or into a nearby field, where they would disintegrate. In today's Indian megacities, a booming consumer culture also casts off objects. However, affordable, mass-produced plastic cups have replaced kulhars. These and countless other disposable items, including the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag, are discarded in alarming quantities. Research proves that globally the volume of waste is increasing even faster than the rate of urbanization. The long­term damage caused by dumping plastic has been widely reported, but nonrecycled plastic can have an immediate negative impact as well of contemporary Mumbai, writer Suketu Mehta observes, "The air outside is a rain of plastic bags, which has replaced the parrots I grew up with."

Accumulating a significant quantity of these thin, multicolored plastic bags has become a way for Joshi to initiate dialogue about these issues and to look at these materials in new ways.

To create these bold works, Joshi uses heat to manipulate and fuse together the bags. She applies the heat-from a candle, a bag sealer, or a heat gun-three or four times to create texture, and, like alchemy, these ubiquitous objects of a convenience-obsessed urban culture become lacelike. By embedding LED lights inside the plastic, she accentuates its surprising delicacy. In addition to changing the appearance of the plastic, the heat hardens it, making it stable enough to create many small clusters that can easily be affixed to large, wooden armatures. Once an exhibition is over, Joshi dismantles the piece and reuses the clusters in subsequent works.

Excerpt from the publication ‘Megacities Asia’ 2016