See like an Artist: Paper Gardens

Nirupa Rao is an artist with a specific interest in public science communication. She published her first illustrated book Pillars of Life—Magnificent Trees of the Western Ghats (2018) in collaboration with ecologists Divya Mudappa and TR Shankar Raman of the Nature Conservation Foundation. The project pioneered a unique method of visually documenting rainforest trees that are difficult to isolate from surrounding flora through photography. With a grant from National Geographic, she then illustrated and co-wrote her next book Hidden Kingdom—Fantastical Plants of the Western Ghats (2019) aimed at opening the eyes of Indian children to the wonders of native flora. In 2020, she received the prestigious National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship to create an animated short film on wild nutmeg swamps of south India, titled Spirit of the Forest. The film has been shown in hundreds of schools across India in an effort to teach children how the formation of the Indian subcontinent at the breakup of Gondwanaland links to the distribution of flora across the planet today. (https://www.hidden-kingdoms.com/). 

In 2024, she participated in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh’s workshop on decolonising their archives. In 2021, she was the youngest artist to be featured in Kew Botanical Garden’s Indian Botanical Art—An Illustrated History, a book by celebrated writer Martyn Rix. She was featured in the BBC documentary Nature and Us—A History Through Art. She was the first artist-in-residence at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Centre, and exhibited her work alongside iconic 20th century botanical painter Margaret Mee. She has also illustrated the cover of Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel Gun Island. During the COVID-19 lockdown, as part of an initiative by the Going to School Foundation, she recorded botanical art classes that were televised on the national channel Doordarshan.