My desire to create is ignited by the mythology, the science, the folklore and the stories that help us navigate the disorienting and dissociative experience of seeing ones self in relation to the “Other”. This “Other” can be the vastness of time, planetary bodies, memory and evolution; or the uncanny yet kindred moments of a snake shedding its skin, lions dreaming together, a tiger diving into a river. There is gulf between us and our non human kin that is filled with cruelty, curiosity, anthropomorphism, othering, empathy and metaphor. I’m interested in how art can explore or subvert the lens of objectification and human supremacy that plagues our observation of the more-than-human world. As I reflect upon our current ecological place, the human figure is something to be dismembered, dissolved and reassembled back into a composition that shifts its relationship with the surrounding plants, animals and landscape. My subjects come from my life experiences as well as from my research into myth and art from the Global South. 

My practice grows from South Asian as well as western painting traditions, with the former heavily influencing my use of color, perspective, and composition. I have two modes of making - either in oil painting alone or in mixed media. The latter begins from a process of writing that charges the space of a painting in a certain direction. Layers of text, drawing, and paint are built up until each piece has its own histories of thought and process fossilized, like sediment in the earths crust. This ground limits and instructs the imagery that can follow on its surface. In the mixed media works I employ techniques from Tanjore painting (an art that uses gold leaf and rhinestones to create scenes of divinity for domestic spaces) passed to me from my grandmother.