Heart Of Gold Print

My work is an effort to imagine an ‘other beauty’ that can exist besides what we assume beauty is or could be. I contemplate about beauty and identity through the collage paintings in terms of color, race, religion, gender and body images. I look for images and then put them together randomly, looking for unexpected avenues, a twist of images, combining them, cutting them and stitching them to create a portrait or figure or sometimes a narrative. The outcome confronts me in terms of unexpected territories that these combinations often create. I use oil paint, pastel, and stitched fabrics to create a visual language that captures these territories. Patterns have always been an integral part of my work because I have always found them fascinating. For me, they represent the vast cosmos which embraces diversity contrary to us, humans, who react to diversity with discrimination. The variation in the pattern in my paintings depicts the diversity that we all are part of; the patterns fuse to express something larger, a system. Humans are part of this system, taking a certain shape and form, but fundamentally representing a force or energy. For the patterns, I draw inspiration from Mughal and Hindu architecture and Indian miniature paintings, which I have grown up seeing and admiring.