Every time my brush touches a canvas, I seem to reach into my subconscious where my childhood memories of a place and time exist. This place is physically and emotionally gone forever, but remnants of that past is part of me and emerge as my subject matter. I want to forget and move on. That seems impossible. Somehow my past always becomes part of my canvas, and those canvases depict who I really am today.

When I embarked on Kolam: Painted Prayers of India series, and found my mother’s old sarees to use as a frame, I felt a spiritual awakening. There was a sense of discovery and connection to the actual me. My art process helped me accept the real me. Then a whole new world opened up and I felt free and light.

Memory and Perception is a collection of imagined spaces and perceptions collected from lived experiences. I use just paint or collage and paint to visualize and express feelings and emotions accrued from the physical world and beyond.

Longings started out with Mexican Amate bark paper. I love handmade paper. I glued this paper to the canvas, and as I started applying paint, I was thinking about the women who made this paper. What were their longings and aspirations? Did they realize it? Women spend their lives nurturing and giving. Do aches, yearnings, and aspirations mellow and die as we age?