Artist Statement

​

Painting, for me, is an act of excavation: memory, migration, myth, resistance, and reclamation. I trained in Chandigarh, India, then lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, before settling in the Bay Area. My practice begins with a question and resolves through intuition, not a fixed plan.

My art is about stories: the ones we grow up hearing, a mix of fantasy, mythology, and today’s world, where the rules are quietly built in. Who gets rewarded, who gets punished, who stays silent. I’m interested in what those rules teach us about how to navigate this world, and it comes out of a diasporic exploration of identity and belonging as fluid and ever evolving.

I make work from inside a patriarchal system, and I don’t think anyone is outside of it. The stories we inherit leave us with an unsaid weight to carry and fears we internalize. At the center are women: the connections between them, and the way they carry life, culture, and dreams, often without being noticed.

I work in watercolor and ink on paper, echoing South Asia's tradition of Wasli miniature painting. Paper is ephemeral, and it absorbs and stains, like the bodies and stories I draw from. Watercolor bleeds, resisting control; ink holds its line.

The work moves in layers, from daily writing to daily sketches to finished paintings, accumulating like sediment until each piece holds its own history. I return to the body as a vessel of memory: gestures women inherit and pass on without ever naming them.

Each piece is a small act of reclamation, giving shape to what was never meant to be spoken.

​

Photo Credit : Anahat Grewal