[2][3] Central themes within her work include the notion of the self as formed by multiple and interlocking relationships with human and animal bodies, places and readymade objects.

Kher reclaims this way of seeing by creating intensely layered and lavish 'paintings' that are charged with the bindi's conceptual and visual links to ideas such as repetition, the sacred and the ritual, appropriation, and a deliberate sign of the feminine.

The bindi becomes a language or code we begin to read through works that elicit formal connections with traditions across Western and Indian art.

Her "Intermediaries" series is exemplary of this, where the artist collects brightly painted clay figurines traditionally displayed in South India during the autumn festive season, which she shatters and then puts back together in order to create fantastical creatures: animal hybrids, irregular and strange people.

Balance Inspired from sacred geometry and ancient mathematics, Kher's practice is preoccupied with the finding the equilibrium of several forces.

Drawn from found objects these works are strange and tantalizing disparate forms – all held together in a delicate but precarious moment of unison.

These have evolved from her 'Warrior series' (Cloudwalker, The messenger, Warrior with cloak and shield, And all the while the benevolent slept) to her 'Sari portraits' where she drapes her sculptures in resin-coated saris.

Critically, the vulnerability of the women stems only in part from their nakedness; Kher's sitters are sex workers, paid by the artist to sit for her, in a self-conscious transaction of money and bodily experience.