Sheela Gowda was born in Bhadravati district of Karnataka in 1957. She did her Diploma (Painting) in the Ken School of Art, Bangalore and studied painting under K.G. Subramanyan of Vadodara. She has also done Post-Diploma (Painting) in Vadodara and MA in Royal College of Art, London. She uses cow dung as a painting medium as a reference to the importance of cows in India, whether religious or functional, the latter including building with cow dung.
  
The Bangalore-based artist. Sheela Gowda has, like some other contemporary Indian artists, been questioning the conventions and aesthetic norms of Indian artistic practice in her work over the last decade. She recently produced a site-specific artwork called "Sakshi Gudda, Sakshi Gode" as part of the German festival in India. Gowda, who has tirelessly refused any easy or formulaic

response to an aesthetics in flux, forsook oil painting to experiment with such materials such as cowdung, kumkum or thread whether in the gallery or open space, producing works that ranged from the sensely tactile to the minimalist. Her conscious turn away from oils and to such materials - a response at least in part to the late 1980s and 1990s rise to prominence of the Hindu Right - is far from reverential. Rather, she has used them to comment on the threat of sudden or ritualised violence that lies congealed within the everyday. In this, her latest work, as in the "Art and Nature" project of 1995, the strategy appears to have somewhat changed, though achieving the same revelatory effect, since the artist takes as her starting point the very location, the rootedness of the site, and certain found objects, in order to work over, and work with urban "nature." It is a sudden peace that takes over and transforms the threat of violence, and yet it is a stealthy peace, an unplanned overgrowth.
       
Sheela Gowda first used thread in a series of coconut fiber works made in 1995, which followed the cow dung paintings. She placed embroidery rings over the fiber delineating two areas in the work the