Upadhyay’s works mainly comprise two media, photography and painting. She begins by questioning the idea of self-representation as an act glorification. She de-magnifies the body and amplifies the urban landscape. The artist's strategy of miniaturizing the body in scale and space can be interpreted as an argument against two supposedly opposed, but curiously analogous, paradigms: on the one hand, the fetishistic images of larger-than-life women's bodies reproduced in the patriarchal visual culture of the billboard, and on the other, the static canon of feminism that has, paradoxically enough, engendered a fixation with women's body-parts in contemporary feminist art.

For instance, her oeuvre ‘Sweet Sweat Memories’ (Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, 2001) was executed on large mixed media paper works. The show was inspired by the suicide committed by the artist’s neighbor as well as the confusion that arose in the urban sprawl due to the same. The artist encapsulated these feelings effectively in her works. Similarly, her installation ‘The Nymph and the Adult’ (Artspace, 2001) in Australia; she sculpted nearly 2000 life- like cockroaches, wherein the gallery was infested with the sculpted nocturnal bugs in order to draw repulsion along with fascination from her viewers. The show raised several significant questions pertaining to survival.

Her works also often portray the idea of ‘home’ as a sense of dislocation with domestic references, where people are violently displaced. The narrative content of her works speak strongly in an urban and thoughtful voice. She incorporates her self image along with photographs in her works, in order to bring distortions to the reading imagery, thereby interfering with what she wants to communicate. Upadhyay pulls in varied and often contradictory directions in her works, attempting to reflect the inner state of dislocation.

Hema builds her work piece by piece, even when the effect looks unkempt; the process is that of a construction in progress. The structure does not comprise of regular elements, but becomes an instrument that someone would use to erase an already established structure. Hema with her conceptual amorphousness or multiplicity cannot be too firm with the cordons she creates to define forms, neither do her forms accept that, nor do her concepts accommodate it.

She constructs her own viewership, as she comes to occupy the central attraction of the scenarios built around her world. Here, her connection with the narrative tradition of Baroda is clearly visible, though she studied there at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, when it was a matter of the generational past. She chose a path of incorporating her daily life into her work, and since her adventurous, apparently tomboyish self would constantly invent situations and place itself with those, one finds a variety of vistas as compensation for the different spatialities to which a viewer would be privy.

Her paintings are her thoughts, schemes; they are to be read, only incidentally, with her mediumistic constraints. As one engages with her series of gestures, postures, one realizes that these are stand-ins/ metaphors, they are possible mimicries of protocol that one creates to sustain a contained world of one’s own.

Hema lives and works in Mumbai, India.