Artist Statement
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My work begins with an emotional response or a question and resolves through intuition. Painting, for me, is excavation — a journey across memory, migration, myth, resistance, and reclamation.
Growing up in a defence family, I moved every few years, adapting to new landscapes and cultures. Later, time in Kenya, Botswana, and South Africa deepened my material language through ceramics, grounding my understanding of surface as tactile and constructed. My practice is built on daily ritual: morning pages, spontaneous sketches, and visual journals. Discipline is essential, but so is play. Without play, there is no growth.
I work primarily on paper, using watercolor and ink. These materials suit the nature of my inquiry — watercolor pools and bleeds, resisting full control, while ink holds a line with quiet precision. Together they mirror the push and pull between memory and intention, the legible and the dissolved. Paper is not a neutral surface; it absorbs, stains, and carries history, much like the bodies and stories I am drawing from.
Women’s lives and stories are at the heart of my work. I am drawn to the myriad ways women carry knowledge, grief, resilience, and joy — often quietly, often without recognition. My female friendships and relationships are a constant source of inspiration: the conversations, the silences, the shared burdens and private victories. These stories find their way into my work through layered marks, fragmented text, and figures that hover between the personal and the universal. I am interested in the body as a site of memory, in the gestures and expressions that women pass down without ever naming them.
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“My work is an instinctive response to the world I inhabit — what I read, what I witness, what unsettles me — expressed through layered symbolism and storytelling.”
What began as a child’s impulse to make marks has become a meditative, deeply researched practice — one that questions inherited narratives and rewrites them when needed.
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Photo Credits: Anahat Grewal
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