Coming into Bharti Kher's BALTIC installationVirus hours before its unveiling, three distinct panels are lined up on the wall, myriad colourful dots punctuated by hand with endless bindis. Two of the more colourful ones remind me of Jackson Pollock's No.5, 1948. But meanwhile Solarum Series 1 is a work in progress attended to by a number of technical staff, Solarum Series 2 sits patiently ready, and Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer is projected against the wall in anticipation of sunset. It's not ready, but even in abeyance it's interesting.

I ask Kher how it feels to be back in the northeast for her first solo show, having studied Fine Art and Painting at Northumbria University in the early 1990s. (Her husband, Subodh Gupta, himself an artist, showcased his work at the Baltic over a year ago.) "It's amazing. The city has changed hugely, it has grown and developed, there's a lot more art, it's much more cosmopolitan. It's like a homecoming for me as I spent three and half years in Newcastle, it's where I learnt, and it's where I met my friends."

Kher was born and raised in London, a typical British Asian, but now lives in New Dheli. "I went to India on a holiday and I met my husband and fell in love and I stayed in India. That's why. I didn't go to discover my roots; they were firmly planted in the UK. I didn't intend to go to India, I didn't intend to meet my husband, and I didn't intend to fall in love, and you know, things happen and I'm very happy."

In the Solarum series, the trees appear to have the look of autumn with rustic colours from the browning of leaves, and the bark itself is a drawn-out peach, a thirsty cry for hydration as if the ground in which it inhabits has become arid and dead. On closer inspection one sees that the leaves are in fact mythological and animalistic heads branched together with manufactured wire, and the bark itself bears no roots, but is cemented into the earth.

"When I was researching for the Solarum series I came across a small Persian image from the 11th century of a tree with the heads of gargoyles. This was the mythological tree that was supposed to give Alexander the Great - as he advanced across Asia - the warning that he would never cross India, and if he attempted to do so he would die. He didn't listen and he went to India where he was subsequently poisoned and died. So this is the warning tree. All these heads are the kind of mythological creatures that have mythological power and give advice and warnings like an oracle tree, and strangely bringing it back into the contemporary context that this is maybe man-made and as you can see it starts to look like it has been constructed."

We move towards Virus itself, adorned with splashes of blues, whites, and greens, oceanic colours that give the ensemble the appearance of seaweed. It could be mistaken for a painting, but it's a sculptural product of her signature bindi motif.

"If you see the bindi panels they're very painting in their approach, they're very much about surface, and there is a lot of texture going on, and a huge sense of colour."

I study the paintings carefully and suddenly the image of the sea in virus becomes swallowed up by the cosmos, and I see the sun, the stars, and the constellations, codes of the origins of life. It all harks back to the natural world, long before today's technology, and I enquire how important it is to be organic in her work.

"Hugely. My work is still very much based on handmade practice. Each head is made by hand and clay and every single one is different. The bindi works the same, you have this idea of layer-based work, it's like textile and it's hugely labour intensive. It talks about a passage of time so it's almost in some ways anti-technology, but in some ways referring to it at the same time."

Which leads us to her final piece, Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, a projection on the wall of a spiral with light emitting from the core like the sun. It's an embrace of new mediums for artistic expression but originating from natural means.

"There are some pieces that I've made that are just lines, all the way up and down, they just look like matrixes, they start to look like codes, they start to look signs, and they refer to an age we live in - but also essentially we are human and we do things, we make things, we touch things."