Biography
Lohitha Kethu, MA, CMI (they/them) is a certified medical illustrator, artist, and writer. Lohitha’s own understanding of illness and the body informs their sensitive and gentle approach to image-making for both patients and content experts. Currently based in Baltimore, MD, they work as a medical illustrator for the Journal of the American Medical Association. Lohitha has also illustrated patient and health literacy books, created art for publication and exhibition, and has art and writing featured in Tilt, Womanly Mag, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and more. They have a fine art practice and write in their free time.
Artist statement
Collecting experiences across past generations or lives, we become archivists of the body by having bodies. Blood, like water, carries memory. Cells keep time and record macro-phenomena, data. Cells talk to us too; it is an unflinchingly loving and violent dictation that may help free us if we listen. In the disabled and gender-variant bodymind, every cell that makes up every function and dysfunction is a horror of tangible pain and an ecstasy of one’s truth. Too often, I cannot tell where the ecstasy ends and horror begins.
My creative practice aims to confront this illusory tension between metaphysical and material, as we are forced or incentivized into increased disassociation from our bodies and collective to survive. I hope to explore the body as a multidimensional microcosm of desires, offerings, prophecies, and connections through mixed media body-horror mythologies and narratives; our bodies’ lived realities as transformative, grotesque, unconditional, and ultimately, blueprint. If g*d is surgery, who, or what, is the scalpel?