The Indian born, Brooklyn based artist Rina Banerjee has a love of materials and enjoys theatrically re-staging their inherent meanings in sculptures and drawings, paintings and videos which are a fusion of cultures and an explosion of imagination. She says her work explores "specific colonial moments that reinvent place and identity as complex diasporic experiences."

Banerjee was born in Kolkata in 1963 and moved with her family to the UK and then to America. She completed a Bachelor’s degree in Polymer Engineering at Case Western University in 1993 and took a job as a polymer chemist at Pennsylvania State University. After abandoning science to pursue her art, she completed an MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 1995, where she won a prestigious award for drawing.

She says as a child she would go to the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art and "try to work out how things were made". This love of substance, fabric and texture manifests itself in her multi media works in which disparate objects such as taxidermy alligators and wooden cots, ostrich eggs and light bulbs are strung up or nestled in with feathers and umbrellas, icons of different faiths and plumes of fabric.

Sourced in cheap toyshops, jumble sales and emporiums selling "Made in China" trinkets to tourists, Banerjee combines such objects and oddities, mixing and experimenting and overlaying one world with another. Like an alchemist Banerjee draws on her experiences growing up in different places, bringing items that act as cultural signifiers together in curious and enchanting compositions. The works have a magical feel and tell stories, their titles such as My Turtle Dove a muskrat bird she was, give a mythical introduction to the artist’s thought process. Her watercolour works explore a dream-like world where strange beastly but oddly endearing creatures are suspended in time, surrounded by hybrid flora and fauna. Sometimes a more sinister undercurrent pervades, giving us a feeling that beneath the glimmer and shine, darker secrets lurk.

"I try to imagine new things by seeing contradictions - this is very much part of my work. I would, for example, mix something that is organic with something that is plastic, something that is feminine with something that is masculine. I like very large forms, as I am interested in the detail of the work." Rina Banerjee

Since Banerjee came to prominence through her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 2000, she has had solo shows, and has been included in group exhibitions around the world including ‘Pretty Is As Pretty Does’, Site Santa Fe (2009), ‘Mythologies’, Haunch of Venison, London, UK (2009), ‘Anomalies’, curated by Jaishri Abhichandani, ‘Distant Nearness’, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas (2008), ‘An Archaeology’, 176, London (2007), Tsumari-Echigo Triennial (2006), ‘Greater New York’, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005), and ‘Whitney Biennial’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000, 2002).