An artist spoke to a full auditorium during the Meadows Visiting Artist Lecture Series about the influence that nature and her surroundings have had on her art and choices of materials.

She showed slides of her sculptural installations at the Bob Smith Auditorium in Meadow’s Museum Tuesday evening.

A native to India and a particularly unique artist, Ranjani Shettar, is represented by Talwar Gallery in New York and has her sculptural installations displayed in several museums including the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

As she wowed an audience of about 50 people, filled with young and old, she showed slides of one-of-a-kind structures that she has created throughout the years.

“For me, nature is the biggest inspiration,” Shettar said.

The first slide was called “Spring,” which in her native language is also a name for a melody of Indian music. The structure looked much like a web filled with tiny atoms. Each little bead or atom was handmade of beeswax and the strings that were attached and hanging from the ceiling were made of cotton strings.

Another structure she showed was called “Heliotropes,” which looked like freestanding tree branches on the wall, facing a window.

“Indian plants always turn towards the light,” Shettar said. “Somewhere there was a metaphor in the material I was using.”

“Heliotropes” was made out of latex and cotton thread, and in order for the latex to become moldable, she had to heat it. She said that this sort of warmth meant something special to her.

Provocative titles like “I Am No One to Tell You What Not to Do,” created some appropriate laughter in the crowd, as she explained the structure was made of mesquite wood, cast silicon and fishline. Shettar carved each piece of mesquite wood, polished it and placed it on the wall. The other pieces hung from the ceiling.

This structure represented the “interdependence between different creatures,” and that two beings can come together and live together.

Shettar’s “Just a Bit More” was made of beeswax and cotton string as well, but was intricate and complicated with a lot of detail in each string. This structure with bright blue beads, also hanging from the wall, “was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together,” Shettar said.

“Me, No, Not Me, Buy Me, Eat Me, Wear Me, Have Me, Me, No, Not Me,” was a favorite with the audience, not just for the name, but for the difficult task she went through by weaving strips of old cars together to form baskets.

“Consumerism was rampant everywhere, but much more in this place,” Shettar said.

She said cars meant the peak of consumerism and decided to go to the city junkyard and hire fabricators to strip the cars for her, since “[she] wasn’t much of a welder.” The baskets symbolized simplicity and, “if we went back 300 years, what was the essential item? Baskets.”

“It was a huge learning experience … I had to find somebody to agree to do this thing I had on my mind. It was good to know the life of these guys also,” she said. She was referring to the task of asking a fabricator working in the junkyard to help her create this project that she had in her head.

Known for her special use of a wide range of materials, Shettar said she is greatly influenced by nature and music and finds two-dimensional paintings with frames binding.

She doesn’t necessarily stick with a plan, but usually follows her intuition.

“I plan it out, but I don’t plan it out to the last element,” Shettar said.