
Bhavna Mehta, Open a window #3, 2012. Paper, thread. | Image: Courtesy of the artist.
When Bhavna Mehta worked as a software engineer for Nokia, she had a sign on her door that read Software Gardener. The label seems telling, now that she has become an artist and her poetic, lush imagery in paper frequently contains trees, plants and flowers.
Hindsight can make someone's path look clearer than it appeared at an earlier moment in time. But Mehta does think her penchant for intricate designs made from cut paper has a strong connection to early origami lessons from her father.
Still, she never could have realized, as a child growing up in the Indian town of Ahmednagar, that learning how to execute this Japanese art form would affect her life in two crucial ways. Exploring its intricacies, as she sees it, foreshadowed a passion for problem solving that led her to an education and career in software engineering. These same youthful lessons in design and structure inform her recent work as an artist.
Bhavna Mehta, How We Remember #1, 2015. Paper. | Image: Courtesy of the artist.
I learned precision, she explains.
Precision alone couldn't yield the kind of lush visual metaphor of a forest seemingly emerging from a human figure in The forest inside of you will go deep and wide. Or the way she depicts a pair of hands knitting, in How We Remember #1, with strands of paper-like yarn in turn becoming strands of words such as forget and remember.
Mehta, 49, clearly imbues her imagery with the force of archetypical symbols. Some of this approach reaches back to her youth and early adult years in India. A series of delicate circular works are collectively titled Chakra, which in Indian thought refers to the centers of spiritual power in the body.
She is just as inclined to offer social commentary in the form of compact visual narratives. In the series dubbed Modern Woman Story, the central figure is in fact a woman, but she has multiple arms (much like a Hindu goddess) and seems to need them. She is attending to children, keeping a stack of plates from falling, making money, flying a kite and myriad other things. She exists in a thick network of forms, some organic and some not, that are an apt symbol of our multifaceted culture -- if also a wry symbol of the same.
Bhavna Mehta, Modern Woman Story #9, 2012. Paper. | Image: Courtesy of the artist.
As she has written, I draw with a knife, cutting paper to tell visual stories.
This approach to drawing has attached a good deal of attention to her work in the last five or so years, earning ardent admiration from peers, a grant from the San Diego Foundation's Creative Catalyst Program for a memorable project from the San Diego Foundation and a string of well received exhibitions. When painter Marianela de la Hoz was given the San Diego Art Prize in 2014 in the established artist category, she selected Mehta for the emerging artist prize and they created memorable collaborative works for their exhibition at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla.
In her current exhibition at Bay Park Press in San Diego, Body 1.0, the story is halfway hidden, suggested by images containing feet, hands and hearts. It is a rumination, as she puts it, on what makes the body tick. In this series, Mehta adds a new formal dimension to her art, sewing forms into the paper: a heart (in two selections), a bird, hands and feet. These images are surrounded by intricate forms, cut from paper and protruding from the surface in relief fashion.
Bhavna Mehta, Heart, 2016. Paper, thread. | Image: Courtesy of the artist.
--
--
This meditation on the body, as Mehta says, has a strong personal dimension: Feet are about me, indirectly. My life is in my hands.
She lost the use of her legs as a child because of polio. And yet it is no exaggeration that this setback was one reason she made the move from India to the United States in the early 90s -- a move she describes as a fortunate one.
Her father believed that the traditional path to marriage for Mehta was unlikely, given her physical limitations.
My father said: you need to be financially independent.' And I thank him for that.
She earned a pair of degrees in India: a B.A. in physics from Ahmednagar College in 1987 and a M.S. in electronic science at the University of Poona two years later. But she decided opportunities were larger in the United States and came to Los Angeles to earn an M.S. in computer science at Cal State Northridge in 1993.
Bhavna Mehta, Take, 2016. Paper, thread. | Image: Courtesy of the artist.
Professional opportunities followed: a decade at Nokia in San Diego beginning in 1995 and then two years at Motorola starting in 2006. But the impulse to pursue art took hold. And with the support of her husband of 16 years, George Cunningham, also a software engineer, she quit in March 2008 with the intention of seeing what it was like to work full time on her art for a year, maybe two. She found it too scary to think that she might be making a life change.
If it doesn't work and I'm totally bored, Mehta recalls, I thought I could go back to engineering. That helped me. I was blessed that I didn't have to pay for a mortgage with my art.
She was anything but bored and Mehta has never looked back.
Artist Bhavna Mehta at work. | Photo: Vanessa Alvarez.
At first she explored various media: painting, one day, collage the next. Then, in 2008, she enrolled in a paper-cutting workshop at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, led by the well-known Beatrice Coron. This experience proved pivotal to Mehta's search for a medium.
A large measure of validation came with an invitation for her to create the designs, in paper, that would be turned into mosaics by Robin Brailsford, Wick Alexander and Kelsey Hartley for a larg
Most recent headlines
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
17/12/2025
KPop Demon Hunters Stars Visit Berklee for Weeklong Celebration Andrew Choi and EJAE, who voiced the film's main characters and contributed to its soundtr...
17/12/2025
With the new season of Dancing with the Stars shimmering in the not-too-distant future this New Year, the celebrity and dancer pairings of the twelve couples ha...
16/12/2025
Hawkins has landed on Spotify, just in time for Stranger Things Season 5, Volume...
16/12/2025
Wherever you are, your favorite music and audio content should go seamlessly with you. That's why Spotify has partnered with NAVER Corp, Korea's leading...
16/12/2025
2025 Wrapped arrived bigger and bolder than ever. This year's experience is designed to be ultra personal and shareable, with new features like Wrapped Part...
16/12/2025
Three 12-kilowatt Advanced Electric Propulsion System thrusters, supplied by L3Harris Technologies, form the core of Gateway's propulsion system. Pictured i...
16/12/2025
The challenge facing America's defense industrial base is not just about speed - its about rebuilding the foundation that makes speed possible. Our nations ...
16/12/2025
Share Share by:
Copy link
Facebook
X
Whatsapp
Pinterest
Flipboard...
16/12/2025
SEVILLE, Spain Canal Sur, the public broadcasting service for Andalusia, Spain, has completed a total technology refresh based on Pebble's resilient, softwa...
16/12/2025
NEW YORK Teleprompting hardware provider Telescript International has acquired all software code and intellectual property previously owned by Telescript West. ...
16/12/2025
As cable operators face increased competition from 5G fixed wireless access providers, a new report from Ookla Research finds that T-Mobile is the FWA speed lea...
16/12/2025
Apple has announced a major upgrade to the Apple TV app for device owners outside the Apple ecosystem with news that the Apple TV app for Android now supports G...
16/12/2025
Space42 grows Direct-to-Device partner ecosystem through a Memorandum of Underst...
16/12/2025
16 Dec 2025
VEON Announces Release Date for Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2025 R...
16/12/2025
16 Dec 2025
VEON's Kyivstar Invests in Renewable Energy in Ukraine with Acq...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Emma Appleton, Fares Fares, Frida Gustavsson and Jakob Oftebro...
16/12/2025
Back to All News
Docu-reality My Korean Boyfriend Gets a Trailer and Premiere D...
16/12/2025
Harmonic's XOS Advanced Media Processor Improves Streaming Video Quality and Boosts Viewer Engagement SAN JOSE, Calif. - Dec. 16, 2025 - Harmonic (NASDAQ: ...
16/12/2025
RT Sport Awards 2025 live on RT One and RT Player at 8:05pm on Saturday 20 December.
On Saturday 20 December live on RT One and RT Player at the earlier t...
16/12/2025
Singer -songwriter Brian Kennedy has been announced as the final celebrity dance...
15/12/2025
Harlem Globetrotters Celebrate 100th Anniversary With New Brand Campaign From Th...
15/12/2025
Top L-R: La Tierra Del Valor (The Home of the Brave), Mangittatuarjuk (The Gnawe...
15/12/2025
L3Harris will leverage 15 years of experience supporting the E-4B Nightwatch and...
15/12/2025
CONWAY, Ark. In a notable example of how the loss of federal funding is forcing public stations to make massive cuts and operational changes, the statewide pub...
15/12/2025
BOULDER, Colo. Public Media Venture Group (PMVG), Venture Technologies Group (VTG), and WQED have completed a multipart agreement that they say will significant...
15/12/2025
Cape Town, November 13, 2025 - SES and International artist and humanitarian, Fo...
15/12/2025
Luxembourg, December 15, 2025 - SES, a leading space solutions company, and Abra Group launched fast and reliable multi-orbit inflight connectivity service on t...
15/12/2025
How Rivian s Design Puts Drivers First-And Why That Matters Published on Dec 15, 2025 Categories: Business Solutions
LinkedIn Corporate Communications
Sha...
15/12/2025
Space42 and Cobham Satcom completed the full range of advanced terminals for the...
15/12/2025
15 Dec 2025
VEON's Beeline Kazakhstan Delivers First Starlink Direct to Cel...
15/12/2025
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor finds himself the topic of year's cracker jokes
Oasis, David Harbour, Celebrity Traitors and Angela Rayner all feature in this y...
15/12/2025
Comscore Expands Cross-Platform Campaign Measurement to Include Audio and Social New capabilities strengthen cross-platform campaign reporting suite; CCR rebran...
15/12/2025
NVIDIA today announced it has acquired SchedMD - the leading developer of Slurm, an open-source workload management system for high-performance computing (HPC) ...
15/12/2025
RT .ie has reached one billion page views this year and is on track to finish 2025 2% ahead of last year. Average time spent on the site is up 3% on 2024, with ...
15/12/2025
Modern workflows showcase the endless possibilities of generative and agentic AI on PCs.
Of many, some examples include tuning a chatbot to handle product-supp...
13/12/2025
Powering Client Growth: Horizon Deepens Nielsen Partnership, Enabling More Effic...
13/12/2025
In a move that will help it offer more flexible and less costly programming options, YouTube TV has announced that it will be launching YouTube TV Plans with mo...
13/12/2025
SINGAPORE Magna Systems has designed, built and completed what is believed to be the first full UHD and IP-based OB truck in Southeast Asia for a Singapore medi...
12/12/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: Everything You Need to Know for Next Week's Big Sho...
12/12/2025
Hailey Gates at the Atropia premiere (photo by George Pimentel / Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)...
12/12/2025
Last month, Spotify announced a new collaboration with the ATP Tour, the global governing body of men's professional tennis, aimed at bringing the next gene...