The visitor leaned toward the canvas before she understood why. The painting showed nothing literal — washes of green and ochre, a suggestion of canopy — but the air around it carried the smell of wet bark and crushed leaf, the particular mustiness of a forest after rain. Only then did she notice the small bowl of resin set into the frame, and the hand-lettered card beside it: a perfume distilled from plants gathered a few kilometres away, in a private rainforest that did not exist twenty years ago.
The painting is the work of Sreekesh Pathal, an Industrial production engineer, certified Perfumer, Numismatist, Experienced in Notaphily, Exonumia and self-taught conservationist who has spent two decades quietly rewilding a corner of Kodagu, the Coorg district of India’s Western Ghats. His practice — natural perfumery, scent-infused natural paintings, and sculptural installations built from the invasive shrub Lantana camara — is an attempt to make an ecological abstraction tangible. The biodiversity crisis is hard to feel. A forest you can smell is harder to ignore.
A thicket the forest cannot shed
What makes Sreekesh Pathal’s experiment worth attention is less the art itself than the problem it circles. Lantana camara, a flowering shrub introduced to India as an ornamental in the nineteenth century, is now classed among the world’s worst invasive species. Across Indian forests, including swathes of the Western Ghats, it forms dense, impenetrable thickets that crowd out native seedlings through competition and allelopathy — the release of growth-suppressing chemicals into the soil. It degrades forage and habitat for large herbivores such as elephants and gaur, raises the risk and intensity of forest fires, and pushes animals toward farmland, sharpening human-wildlife conflict.
The stakes are amplified by where this is happening. The Western Ghats are older than the Himalayas and recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the planet’s hottest biodiversity hotspots, with levels of endemism — species found nowhere else — that few regions on Earth can match. The range shapes the Indian monsoon and feeds the rivers that sustain much of peninsular India. Kodagu alone, one of the country’s smallest districts, holds a disproportionate share of Karnataka’s plant diversity.” The arrival of a single aggressive shrub in such a system is not a gardening nuisance. It is a structural threat.” As per Sreekesh Pathal.
Sreekesh Pathal came to this fight by an unlikely route. Born in Kannur, in neighboring Kerala, he trained as a Production Engineer and built a career in Quality, Health, Safety and Environment Management -QHSE , for an American oil and gas company, an industry he describes as among the most environmentally damaging he could have joined. That was the point. “I wanted to understand how the harm is done from the inside,” Sreekesh Pathal says. He funneled his early earnings into ten acres of coffee and cardamom plantation, then did something most of his neighbours considered eccentric: he cleared the cash crops, roots and all, and let native forest return. Today, with the surrounding hills given over to monocultures of coffee and silver oak, his patch draws birdwatchers and naturalists hunting for species the wider landscape has lost.
Distilling a place into paint
The art grew out of the land. Sreekesh Pathal began by distilling the fleeting essences of wild plants into natural perfumes, an old craft he approaches with an engineer’s precision and a conservationist’s reverence. From there came the perfumed paintings, in which fragrance is treated as a compositional element rather than a gimmick, and the installations — furniture and sculptural objects worked from Lantana stems, the invasive turned into the evocative.
“Scent is memory you cannot argue with,” he says. “You can show people a chart of species loss and they nod. You let them breathe a forest that is disappearing, and something changes.” Whether that translates into action is, by his own admission, uncertain. But the exhibitions are designed to do more than move people emotionally.
One tool, not a cure
Each show functions as a dual platform: awareness on one wall, commerce on the next. Alongside Sreekesh Pathal’s own work, the exhibitions display and sell furniture and artefacts crafted from Lantana by tribal artisans of the Western Ghats. The logic is direct. Harvesting Lantana for craft removes biomass from the forest while putting income into the hands of indigenous communities whose traditional livelihoods have eroded.
This is not SreekshPathal’s invention. In reserves and forest landscapes elsewhere in southern India, communities such as the Soliga have for years turned Lantana into baskets, stools and other furniture, supported by research institutions that saw both an ecological and an economic opening. Pathal positions his work within that lineage rather than apart from it. “We did not discover this,” says one artisan whose pieces have featured in his shows. “But the city does not see our chairs. He brings the city to the chair.” The remark captures the modest mechanics of the thing: markets, not miracles.
Researchers who study Lantana management tend to be careful here, and so is Sreekesh Pathal. Cutting and crafting the shrub can suppress it locally and fund the people doing the cutting, but it does not, on its own, defeat an invasion that spans millions of hectares and regenerates aggressively from cut stumps. Removal must be sustained, paired with active restoration of native species, and matched to the scale of the problem — which craft alone cannot reach. Treated as a complete solution, the approach risks overpromising. Treated as one instrument among several, it earns its place.
That distinction may be the most useful thing Sreekesh Pathal’s exhibitions communicate, beyond the perfume and the paint. There is a tendency, in conservation storytelling, to reach for the redemptive arc: the villainous weed transformed, the forest saved, the artisan lifted. The reality is slower and more partial. A shrub the forest cannot shed becomes, for a season, a chair, a sculpture, a few thousand rupees. The trees that matter still have to be planted by hand, and watched for years. Sreekesh Pathal seems to understand that the value of his work lies less in resolving the contradiction than in keeping people standing inside it long enough to look — close enough, even, to smell what is at stake.
