Shrishti Chatterjee

Seeking Ground

The market has a tendency to reduce beings into economic abstractions of themselves. Seen through the lens of the market, a tree is paper, the sky is a clock, an ant is a pest. And the graphic designer is a visual marketer optimizing for scale, efficiency and engagement. It erodes their sense of place and the possibility of connection.

Seeking Ground asks how we might return to a more rooted practice. Physically, the ground is the solid surface on which all other things rest. Conceptually, it is the foundational premise from which knowledge is derived.To be grounded is to be connected to real world implications and lived experience. The act of grounding oneself is the process of positioning oneself within a context — spatially, conceptually and in relation to others.

By paying attention to more than human intelligences and through primary encounters with place I attempt to make work that evokes materiality, embodied presence, and multiplicity. Immersing ourselves in place offers something back to the designer: a renewed sense of wonder, a feeling of belonging, and the recognition that we, too, have agency, and ground from which to act.

Night-Blooming Jasmine 

Night Jasmine is a video projection piece that asks what it would mean for women to truly inhabit public spaces after dark, not simply pass through it, but linger.

Drawing on the nocturnal rhythms of the luna moth and the night-blooming jasmine, the work approaches this question through pleasure: sensory, unhurried, and fully present. It insists that pleasure, not surveillance, must be centered in any serious conversation about women's access to public space.

Forecast 

Forecast is a pixel font designed to express different weather conditions. Applied across a two-part poster series, it maps a month of parallel weather tracking in October 2025 across two places: Providence, Rhode Island and Kozhikode, Kerala. The posters fold into a square accordion book that can be flipped to see the weather of a single day.

The Strike of the Heron

Developed in collaboration with researcher Rachel Fleming, the project investigates the precise movement of the heron's strike. In a fraction of a second, the bird's neck, a remarkably flexible skeletal structure, coils and releases with a speed and coordination that is difficult to fully perceive with the naked eye.

Working from high-speed field recordings, we slow this movement down, analyze its mechanics, and translate it into an interactive prototype that recreates the neck's morphology and motion.

Inhabitants of the Ground

A series of interlocking posters that pays attention to the overlooked inhabitants of the ground, from ginkgo leaves and maple seeds to spotted lanternflies, earwigs, and cabbage butterflies.