Portfolio

1. Pieces of abstract expressions, using watercolour pigment, gouache, gum arabic. These paintings represent my daily practice. I paint with my fingers, using various materials, which interact with each other in different ways, to create textures and patterns that always change as they dry. Unpredictable, but personal, the image once dried symbolises my rapport with myself and nature. I never know how it is going to end up, but always feel connected to the final piece. It is a part of me. 

2. Chromopathos. 2017. A poem that describes how colours can heal and provide remedy.

3. Darkness Clings. 2010. An intense pencil drawing to express tactile hallucinations.

4. Organic psychotic disorder (undefined). Mixed media on torn watercolour paper, 14 x 21cm, 2000-2017.

This wonky, textured painting expresses my very own sense of wavering between being  (or not being) a ‘psycho’. It expresses chaotic moments of sheer, violent darkness, seen in the angry black whole around the edge of the piece. But these dark moments give burst to periods of dazzling light, which represents the insight, growth and acceptance that can be gained from living through bad times. My small painting shows a thick, black whole that has subsumed my edges, and its eruption into vision and colour. Such a transition from dark to light is made possible, I realise, through the healing powers that making art has, to help us make sense of ourselves, and the world. Making this work provides me with redemption and recognition from the darkness in the shooting rays of light, which open my psycho being into a universe of new possibilities.

5. #sunshineaftertsunami. 2017. Photograph.

6. Making Sense: The Art Van. Mixed media. 2017.

‘Making Sense: The Art Van’ is a brainstorm that maps an artistic project led by myself and artist and art therapist Sruthi Sriram. We go to Chhattisgarh, India to make and share art with the estranged, indigenous Indians, the adivasis. The Art Van will open a method for the villagers to become participants in a process of making sense. Once assembled, we lead and facilitate performance workshops, and story-telling, which help the adivasis to make sense of their lives and experiences, whether good or bad, without limit or pre-enforced evaluation. We introduce the concept and practice of using art as a practice of reflection. The art and sense of being thence produced builds for participants a self-resilience, and a way to reflect. Making this artwork enabled me to reflect on what I may discover and learn from the trip. It helps me to research the issues, traditions, culture and locations of the places we will go to.

7. Stills from  Touché, DVD of 16mm film, 2 min 54 sec.

This is a digital video of a 16mm film made from painting on 100 feet of leader. I used natural materials (iodine, food dye, egg yolk, blood, mud). These materials and the film itself have since disintegrated. This was an intuitive, organic process. There were practical problems of utilising this medium, which influenced my decision-making process and the final effect of the film. The paint on the reel began to disintegrate as the natural materials went sour, and lost their colour. All that is left is my digital video of playing the film on the Steenbeck machine. My film engages with the materiality of the medium – and the technical features of the 16mm analogue film (the speed and sound of projection, the flickering lights, the transition of the reel) become a part of the liberating affect of the experience it provides when I watch it. This affect is poetic, ephemeral, tactile and temporal. It brings forward a direct moving sense that transcends the technology that enables it to happen and touches how I exist in time. In this way the film is like a surface for my own reflexive/reflective mirror. It liberates me as an artist. This is because the rhythmic movement, ascension and descending of colours and forms tremble and tumble into oscillating dimensions that present how I as an artist perceive the world. This viewpoint may seem ‘disturbing’ or even ‘mesmerising’, when the viewer watches the relentlessness of its disruptive duration. It opens up an interface for new kinds of perceptions about time and hapticity, and offers new possibilities for analogue film. To watch this film, click on the ‘Film’ tag on the right hand side of this website, or visit: https://youtu.be/MnxnuI8gS2E 

8. The Pulse of Pranayama, interactive performance installation, 2014. For this piece I recorded the sound of my heartbeat during strenuous activity in a hot room, that is, participating in a class of Bikram yoga. This class gets very hot, my heartbeat races and pummels my chest. I recorded the sound and rhythm by fixing a microphone onto my chest. I then set up an installation to play this sound in a similarly hot room, whilst viewers (participants) came into the room to practice Bikram yoga in time to the sound of my racing heartbeat.

9. Closure. 2017. Painting and text on inside of cover of empty sketch pad, with a thin layer of tissue paper stuck to the spine. uided more by feelings and instinct than pre-planned thoughts, this piece seems to express undergoing trauma, but also — and explicitly — a ‘survivor identity’ emerging. The whole thing is contained in the inside cover of a book. The hope is that this book can be closed, whilst the survivor flies away into a new life.

10. Daily collage of aphoristic words and phrases cut out and reassembled from various newspapers. I create these simple sentences every day, to make sense of all my thoughts and experiences. Ongoing.