Artist Statement
Painting, for me, is an act of excavation — memory, migration, myth, resistance, and reclamation. My path has moved across continents: trained in Chandigarh, India, then living in Johannesburg, South Africa, before settling in the Bay Area. My practice begins with a question and resolves through intuition, not a fixed plan.
I explore the unsaid code of Maryada (मर्यादा / ਮਰਯਾਦਾ): the unwritten boundary of what a "good girl" is permitted to want, say, or become. Nobody hands you a rulebook — you absorb it in a glance, a silence, a sentence left unfinished. It is the weight of family pride placed on a girl's shoulders before she understands what she's carrying — the patriarchal gaze internalized so early it starts to feel like your own voice. Maryada is rarely spoken aloud, yet it shapes everything: what is wanted, what is said, what is allowed to be seen.
I return to figures like Sohni, who swam across the river each night on an unbaked clay pot until it dissolved beneath her, and Pandora, who opened the box she was warned never to touch — both punished for wanting something enough to risk everything. I'm drawn less to the warning than to the plunge itself. Text, drawing, and paint accumulate in layers until each piece holds its own history, like sediment settling over time. I return again and again to the body as a vessel of memory — gestures women inherit and pass on without ever naming them.
These threads surface as asemic writing — marks carrying the rhythm of language without fixed meaning, holding the unsaid, the things never allowed to be spoken plainly. Yet this code was never carried alone; women bond together, quietly, to get each other through a society built to constrain them.
I work primarily on paper, in watercolor and ink, echoing India's tradition of Wasli painting. Watercolor bleeds, resisting control; ink holds its line. Paper is never neutral — it absorbs and stains, like the bodies and stories I draw from.
Each piece is a small act of reclamation: giving shape to what was never meant to be spoken.
Together, myth, memory, mark-making, and material form a practice less about a fixed image than staying faithful to a process of uncovering — each piece a small act of reclamation, giving shape to what Maryada tried to keep unspoken.
Photo Credit : Anahat Grewal