Rhea Gupte

The white rabbit from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, stylish-waistcoat-wearing, pocket-watch-carrying, marks the beginning of Alice’s adventure. Instead of being a typical children’s book character gleefully inviting the protagonist into a new world, the rabbit is busy, late and running out of time, almost too occupied to notice Alice.  

Artist Rhea Gupte sees a similarity with the white rabbit’s state of mind to our experience of time and how we often end up thinking about it. ‘Have We Become The White Rabbit?’ by Culture Decanted follows this thought in an article dissecting our relationship with time in the age we live in.

For this campaign, she created the opposite, a solitary, leisurely, anthropomorphic character, thriving in the stillness of time.

Vogue India commissions Rhea’s Ethical Threads series to honour Indian designer Anita Dongre’s work in sustainable fashion for their March 2022 issue.

PUBLISHED BY

VOGUE INDIA
march, 2022

Doesn’t our reality begin with our dreams? The subconscious and the conscious. The real and the surreal. Our dreams tell us about where we are and where we will go. Dreamers are the same. In stillness, in chaos, together or afar. Connected and connecting. The dots of hope.

For the Yavi Autumn Winter campaign 2020 designer Yadvi sent visual artist Rhea Gupte on a brainstorming spree with the words — inside Out, lines and geometry, set design, treasure hunt and mystery. Rhea’s thoughts led her to her childhood memories of reading Nancy Drew and every mystery novel written by Enid Blyton as well as hours spent in front of the computer with her mum and sister playing Mystery Case Files together. A peer proclaimed super sleuth at Cluedo, it was only natural for Rhea to dream up a campaign with invisible people shrouded in the midst of sinister happenings in their elusive family.

She wove flowers in her head
One for each battle she sought and fought.
She wore flowers in her head
One for each thought she held and fled.
She carried her flowers like companions,
Her many moods and strengths
Her anger, her resent
Her petals held tenacity
Her head held resolve
Her mind held the world
In beauty and absolve
She wrote flowers in her head
One for every story she’d tell
She wore flowers in her head
They carried her smell.

The joy of being is in laughter under a boundless sky, in watching weightless bubbles rise, in holding on to our dreams and trying. The joy of being is in watching stars on a cloudless night, soaring into our limitless lives, our own quiet company at sunrise, and planting roots to thrive.

SHAYA — jewellery campaign

“As of 2017 only 0.93% of the world’s professional footballers were women. For any sphere of human enterprise to have less than 1% women is worrisome.”

COMMISSIONED BY

MAYU — fashion campaign

COMMISSIONED BY

VARNIKA ARORA — campaign

COMMISSIONED BY

MOUNTAIN AND MOON — campaign

“Can clothes emote? Through this series, I tried to portray clothes with emotions; as isolated creatures, as vulnerable souls, as wanderers and narrators, as lovers and as friends. As pieces of value to be kept and not thrown.” 

EXHIBITED BY

MASALA MOVEMENT
COLOGNE, GERMANY — june, 2019

“I was inspired by the concept of circularity. I wanted to bring about a narrative of how, if it were a utopian world, every piece of clothing could go back to earth, where it came from, in its entirety. I hope for these images to resonate as a connection to having circularity in the fashion industry, along with starting conversations about how we often discard, reject and consume clothing mindlessly. Through this photo series I also continue my exploration of giving clothes human qualities and having them emote. By making clothing the heroes of this campaign, I hope to have them seen as possessions for life rather than something one wears only for a single summer.“

Indoor pollution from the smoke of earthen cookstoves (called chulhas in Hindi) used for cooking and heating, is the primary cause of respiratory diseases in rural and poverty-stricken areas of India. I volunteered with an Indian non profit organisation, Smokeless Cookstove Foundation, which conducts workshops to teach a technique of creating a costless, smokeless cookstove.

COMMISSIONED BY

EURUMME — campaign

COMMISSIONED BY

POSH PRIDE — campaign

Work for the Smokeless Cookstove Foundation, an Indian non-profit, working to solve the problem of indoor pollution in India.

COMMISSIONED BY

400 THINGS — campaign & product shoot