Here The Sun Fades Memories Too

 I ran away from my birthright only to find myself embraced by it. 

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‘Here the Sun Fades Memories Too’ is a body of work that is rooted in the act of reclamation, the approach is simple. I want to paint the life I left behind, celebrating the people who raised me and make up for lost time.

The catalyst for this body of work were the picture frames covered in marigold garlands encasing photographs of family members who had recently passed away. It was hard realising that the shelf near the little temple that housed these frames was only getting more and more crowded,  so in an attempt to prevent this overbearing feeling of loss from taking over me I resorted to painting my family, my nani’s home, the sky that bleaches the shingles on our roof every afternoon and the dusty smog that cradles everything in a haze.

I plan to create six medium to large scale paintings for this body of work informed by colour and geometric shape acting as artefacts of memory. I want these images to invoke a sense of specific shared cultural nostalgia experienceable for the larger Indian diaspora. I am interested in creating a surface that is full of history, each mark recording time and thought. Spaces collapse, figures vibrate and objects are superimposed on top of one another. The resolution of these paintings comes from a search. The lines and swatches of colour are the revelatory instruments. The goal is to tap into a tender moment bereft of logical perception of time, accuracy and space and are destabilised in a way that resembles our perception of memory.

This project also focuses on reimagining my connection with my own identity. The weight of being born in a postcolonial world has leaked into the visual imagery and acted as a means to heal a relationship with my former life by embracing the vestiges of what I left behind.

Once I lived inside a narrative where running away to America was a solution. I believed that everything that I was hiding from would stop following me once I crossed the border but it was through this act of migration that I have been finally able to cherish and embrace all aspects of the life I left behind. For the first time in my life the solution was written in who I was and not in who I wanted to be.