Artist Statement

My practice draws on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical notions of embodiment.  For him, the physical body is the ‘ground for all perception’ as knowledge is continuously constituted and reconstituted through bodily experience.

In painting and sculpture, I use two-dimensional mark-making and my own bodily movements to capture the flows of knowing, seeing and embodied intermingling specific to the South Asian female and their everyday environments.  Playing with spaces, surface, colour, and texture is a process of subversion and protestation, enabling me to explore their physical and psychological interiorities.  It allows for the collapse of interlocking ideas having to do with the post-colonial subject, gendered orientalism, and the stereotypical sexuality of the female body to make way for new forms of subjectivity and spectatorship. 

In performance I contextualize the female experience through stories of a place or space, by bringing forth the embodied tensions that arise from internal conflicts that women find themselves in.  Culturally, the male gaze continues to permeate and dominate ways of seeing. Globally, migration, wars, and terrorism continue to propagate the oriental and post-colonial lens through which South Asian women are seen. My performative practice serves to challenge both of these positions of looking. Instead, it offers a re-examination of South Asian female subjectivity and spectatorship. I use histories and associations related to spaces to reanimate their experience and allow the viewer to see my female subjects through a lens that subverts those histories.