ARTIST STATEMENT

"The main themes I address through my practice are displacement, migration, loss of culture and traditions, cultural assimilation and hybrid cultures."

I consider myself a beneficiary of multiple cultural lineages. Born into a Hindu-Punjabi family, married into a Kashmiri Hindu family, and living in Canada for more than twenty-five years, I approach my artistic practice from a layered perspective that is both personal and diasporic. Through painting, printmaking, artist books, paper sculpture, and research-based methodologies, I explore questions of displacement, cultural memory, migration, and belonging. My work is informed by lived experience and by the histories of the Kashmiri Pandit community, Indigenous to the Kashmir Valley in Jammu and Kashmir, India. The forced displacement of this community during the political violence of the early 1990s continues to shape my inquiry into memory, loss, resilience, and cultural continuity. Materiality is central to my practice. I combine traditional Indian materials and processes—including organic tea inks, hand embroidery, and stitching—with techniques such as printmaking, watercolour, gouache, paper cutting, and oil painting. My work often takes the form of paintings, artist books, hand-constructed paper phérans, and scrolls, using layered surfaces to explore how histories and identities are carried across time and place.

The visual language of my work draws on geographical mapping, the Devanagari and Sharada scripts, and multilingual text in Hindi, Kashmiri, and English. I incorporate references to Kashmiri textiles, embroidered shawls, archival photographs, sacred sites, and the landscape of Kashmir alongside observations from my life in Edmonton and my experiences across Canada. My study of Indian miniature painting informs my approach to narrative, layering, and detail. As a painter and storyteller, I am committed to gathering, documenting, and reinterpreting stories that might otherwise be overlooked or lost. Through contemporary art, I seek to preserve and reactivate cultural knowledge while creating space for reflection, dialogue, and intergenerational exchange. My work functions as both a personal and communal archive, exploring how memory is sustained and how identities endure through acts of remembrance, adaptation, and care.