Context as Key: The Art Practice of nimmi
Hut00041440
MA in Painting
Wimbledon College of Arts
2017-2019
Introduction
I have always been attracted to the use of fiction as method. As Simon O’Sullivan suggests,
‘Art practice is the production of fictions that allow - almost as a side effect - for a glimpse of the real’
(Shaw & Reeves–Evison [Eds.] 2017, pg. 308).
In Unit 1, I used a fictional debate, in Unit 2 a fictional lecture. Here in Unit 4, I use a radio programme modelled on Woman’s Hour. It takes place in the year 2099, years after my own ‘real’ death.
I have interpreted the task of this essay to be an exposition of the context of current art practice in 2019, as it influences my own work. Thus there is a to-ing and fro-ing between the contemporary British and international art practice and my own process and products.
Jenni Murray Junior (JMJ): Welcome today’s Woman’s Hour. It is July 31st 2099 and we will continue our series on Lesser Known Women Artists of the Previous 100 Years. Our artist for today is a woman who called herself simply ‘nimmi’. Today marks 50 years since her death. She was born in Hong Kong the daughter of Indian diplomatic parents. Though widely travelled, she lived much of her life in India until, at the age of 45, she immigrated to the UK. She trained at Oxford as a social and developmental psychologist and after a moderately successful career as an academic, she threw it all up at the age of 63 to study art. She supported herself as a psychotherapist, and this kept her close both to the pains and angst of life and to the resilience and capacity to flourish that she saw in herself and in her patients.
On our programme today are Lorraine Nanke (LN), a clinical psychologist, a Buddhist and a mindfulness teacher, Kriton Papadopoulos (KP) an artist and art historian, and Rev. Ruth (RevR), a priest in the Anglo-Catholic Church. We also have Tanya Hutnik Junior (THJ), nimmi’s granddaughter, who is a graphic designer at Design 102.
JMJ: I believe nimmi started her day in a state of mindful meditation. Lorraine, can you tell us about the relationship between mindfulness meditation and the production of a piece of art.
LN: Mindfulness is a term used by psychologists in the West to enable anxious clients’ to quieten their chattering minds. Mindfulness (Hutnik, 2017: Zindel et.al. 2012) comes originally from Buddhist meditation practice (HH Dalai Lama 1998) and refers to a quality of alert, non-judgemental openness and attention.
When an artist of Buddhist persuasion faces the task of art making, she brings the quality of ‘open-mindedness’ or mindfulness to her work. From within the empty space of stillness she faces the canvas or installation with beginner’s mind (Baas & Jacob, 2004), seeing objects and ideas as if for the first time. She does not know the outcome, what shape the art will ultimately take. As Stephen Batchelor has so accurately put it, from within her position of non-attachment, resisting the temptation to edit and to eliminate, she allows the image to emerge (Batchelor, 2002). Motivated by non-attachment she transcends all previous conceptualisations and experiences and suspends all judgement. From this space of emptiness (Epstein, 2004) a fresh new creation arises. nimmi was deeply influenced by Buddhism even though she would not really call herself a Buddhist. The quality Mindfulness enables being present in the NOW (Tolle, 2001) which for nimmi meant an immersion in ‘the everyday’. In 2002, Ben Highmore had begun conversations about the everyday, referring to Freudian slips of tongue in everyday life as embodying hidden, unconscious desires (Highmore, 2002). In 2008, Stephen Johnstone had produced a seminal book on artists of The Everyday (Johnstone, 2008) in which he documented the work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Chantal Ackerman, Francis Alys and such, all of who were dignifying everyday objects or finding value in popular culture. Influenced by this context of approval of the ordinary, nimmi painted her rucksack, her teapots, the magpie outside her window, the clothes she had left on the back of the chair in her bedroom.
JMJ: Perhaps one of the reasons that nimmi’s art was sidelined was precisely that it was so autobiographical, don’t you think? Kriton what are your thoughts on autobiographical art?
KP: Let me see, we are talking 80 years ago. 2019 was a time when conceptual art was in its heyday and eschewed traditional methods of painting and sculpture in favour of art driven by concepts or ideas. One does not need to mention Robert Rauchenberg or Damien Hirst. Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden and others who had spearheaded the Art and Language movement in the late 1960s as a spin off of conceptual art, emphasized the use of text within form to produce art. In 2019, at the first Draw Art exhibition in London Michael Janssen presented 114 A 3 pieces, unframed and tacked to the wall with common pins, depicting the portraits of famous people drawn on top of obliterated text. This use of text alongside form was to influence nimmi’s art. So it seems that in a state of mindful meditation, nimmi allowed her 6 am paintings to emerge using both text and form. But unlike the conceptual artists, she used text to convey meaning and to provide a handle to the viewing audience about the nature of the work. This was not a popular thing to do.
One of the major theories that had captured the imagination of many artists at the time, particularly those trained at Goldsmiths in London, was Object Oriented Ontology, commonly known as OOO, (Bogost, 2012; Bryant, Smicek and Harman, 2011; Harman, 2018; Kerr, 2018) in which objects themselves are interrogated to reveal their meaning and history. Ian Monroe is lauded for his understanding of OOO and his embodiment of this philosophy in his work, as are other well-known artists. Sara Grisewood, for example, spent many hours making paper and then making bags and books out of paper and photographs, laboriously stitching it all together into installations, depicting the ghost-like history of industrial sites.
So at this time autobiographical art was rare. But it was not absent: Tracey Emin had just launched her ’Fortnight of Tears’ at the White Cube (Emin, 2019). Of course, self-portraiture has been prevalent among artists for centuries, people like Rembrandt, Van Gogh and many others, and Frida Kahlo had paved the way for autobiographical art many years earlier when she depicted the many operations she had to go through as a result of her accident. nimmi’s contemporaries in autobiographical art were people like Amalia Ullman in her fabricated autobiography entitled ‘Excellences and Perfections’ in which she presented a series of 175 photographs via Instagram and Facebook featuring her pole-dancing and her plans for breast augmentation. (Soriano & Rideal, 2018). And Sophia Al- Maria, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2019, displayed her ‘carrier bag’ of autobiographical images, sounds and anecdotes. But the kind of autobiographical painting that nimmi was producing was different and perhaps less engaging because she was plumbing the depths of her own soul rather than painting a self-portrait (though she did that too) or recording in visual form, events that had occurred in her life (though she did this too). It seems to me, if you look at her face diagrams that she was aware that she was out of sync with contemporary British art of her time.
JMJ: But autobiographical video art had become popular with feminists, is it not?
KP: Yes, yes feminists such as Lisa Steele(1974) and Irene Loughlin (2008) used video art to confront the advertising world’s stereotypes of the female body as romanticized, idealized and unblemished. Steele’s ‘Birthday Suit with Scars and Defects’ depicted her naked body detailing everyday traumas of minor accidents and injuries. Loughlin’s ‘Considering: Birthday Suit with Scars and Defects by Lisa Steele’ presented detailed narratives of physical and sexual assault, sexual abuse, depressive episodes, hopelessness and dissociation (Smith, 2014). Charlotte Prodger had just won the Turner Prize using autobiographical video to portray the Queer experience (Prodger, 2018).
So, the use of video to document the everyday had seen an explosive increase in the general public; in 2013 Youtube viewers posted over 72 hours of video every minute and this rose to a phenomenal 300 hours of video every minute in 2016, a 416 per cent rise in the use of this technology (Uricchio, 2019). nimmi used virtual reality to invite the viewer into her home and indeed into her very bedroom to witness the creation of her 6 am paintings. In popular culture of the time, people were exploiting social media to reveal intimate aspects of their life and in many ways nimmi’s 3D videos were no different to homemade videos posted on Facebook or Instagram. The only difference was that she used a 3 D camera. Admittedly the content of her video art was different too: in her piece titled “Come” she creates her own modern tea ritual based on the old Japanese ceremony, she introduces us to her dog, she expands on what it feels like to be 65 and she shows us how she creates her 6 am paintings. It seems that she was concerned about audience engagement and participation, about the quality of the audience experience (Uricchio, 2019) and so she chose 3D (as opposed to 2D) as an interactive event in which the viewer had the agency to circumlocute around the room in whichever direction they chose.
JMJ: Around this time, the philosopher Alain de Botton had published his book ‘Art as Therapy’ (de Botton & Armstrong, 2017). Lorraine, as a clinical psychologist, is art a type of therapy?
LN: Well in my opinion, art should act as therapy but often it does not. For example so much of conceptual art has been too far beyond the purview and understanding of the lay viewer that it had ceased to excite, to stimulate and to heal. Conceptual art was often art made for other artists. De Botton encouraged artists to produce art that enables people to lead better lives (de Botton and Armstrong, 2017 pg. 57). As human beings we sometimes forget what matters, we can’t hold on to slippery experiences, we can lose hope and feel isolated and persecuted because we don’t have a measure of jut how difficult ‘normal’ is. We can become unbalanced and lose sight of our best selves. Indeed we can be mysterious, even to ourselves, and struggle to explain ourselves to other people. We have many prejudices, which get in the way of our ability to connect with people. We live in such a highly commercialised, glamorous fantasy world that we can be dissatisfied with the hum drum existence of everyday life (de Botton and Armstrong, 2017). It is in relation to these human frailties that art steps in to be a corrective and healing experience. For de Botton, art enables us to remember what really matters. Art can re-ignite hope. Art can enable us to process sorrow and to realise that others suffer in much the same way we do, thereby reducing our sense of isolation and aloneness. Art can function to further our self-understanding. Art can also cause us to grow by pointing to that which we find repulsive, or boring, enabling us to recognize and come to terms with feelings of disgust or ennui. So good art takes our half formed thoughts and musings and gives them clear expression. It enables us to say, ‘Yes! Yes! I know this kind of feeling’.
So my answer to your question is, yes, art can act as therapy for the soul.
JMJ: and nimmi’s art? Was her art functioning as a kind of therapy?
LN: I think she may have used the 6 am paintings, which were almost ritualistic in nature, to become centred and present to her day and thus to heal herself, to rebalance, to grow and appreciate who she was and what her surroundings held. She also transcribed the whole Book of Ecclesiastes, during this period as a kind of centring discipline. Paintings such as ‘Burnout 1’, which was selected for inclusion in the Trinity Buoy Wharf exhibition of 2019, (so indeed she did have a few fleeting moments of glory) portray the exhaustion of a woman’s life, something that many people could identify with, in the relentless workweek of the 2020s.
JMJ: Tanya, in this age of digital dematerialisation (Pinker, 2018), it is wonderful that you came across the hard copies of your grandmother’s paintings. Do tell us about these.
THJ (excitedly): I found hundreds of 6 am paintings, and not just black, red and white ones. When my mother died a year ago, I cleaned out her loft and came across my grandmother’s store of 6 am paintings, each one dated and signed. It seems that she painted them till even a few months before her death. She just kept painting and painting on sketchbook paper using Sharpie pens. She branched out into Acrylic markers and handmade khadi paper using many colours to portray both inner and outer worlds. And she did larger paintings too in oils and acrylics, detailing her work as a therapist and also her concerns for ethnic equality (Hutnik, 1991).
JMJ: So Tanya, I am imagining your grandmother sitting on her bed at 6 am in the morning, every morning or every other morning, with her A3 paper to hand and facing, as it were a blank canvas waiting mindfully for an image to emerge. What did emerge?
THJ: I tried to organise the work into major themes, which was a Herculean task given that there are about 500 6 am paintings. But a few major themes did cluster together. MammaSmall (I used to call her MammaSmall because she was so diminutive) was concerned about ageing, her own ageing body and it seems her diminishing sexuality. Have you looked at her humour in ‘Libideo, oh Libideo, wherefore art thou, my Libideo?’ And ‘Yes, Yes, Yes’ .
KP: Ageing and sexuality seemed to be a dominant discourse among artists of the time, so this was not particularly new. Suzanne Lacy (1986) for example had been concerned since the 1960s about the invisibility of ageing women and used her art to re-infuse them with power and agency. In one piece she had 154 ethnically diverse women, all clothed in white sit on a beach in groups of 4 discussing their thoughts about the physical process of aging, preparing for death, loss, the women's movement and what advice they would give to younger women. More pertinent to nimmi’s time was the work of Alea Chapin (Gosslee & Zises Eds. 2018), ‘It was the Sound of their Feet’ and ‘The Last Droplets of the Day’ in which she portrayed in oil on huge canvases, the joy and the exuberance displayed in the bodies of older women. And of course, there was the work of Eleanor Antin, in which Antin, grieving the loss of her husband David to Parkinson’s, decided to re-enact her dieting performance of 1972 in ‘Carving: 45 years later’ where she presented 148 photographs of her octogenarian body complete with lines, enlargements, curves and shrinkages. Here she used her art in her process of grieving as self-healing, carving away the weight she had gained while caring for her sick partner. In the light of these major works nimmi’s 6 am paintings seem unremarkable, though beautiful in their own right. She could have made more of them perhaps, by popularising them as posters or putting them on cards or everyday artefacts like mugs, mouse pads etc.
JMJ: And other themes, Tanya, in your grandmother’s work?
THJ: Well, there were many themes: her relationships, her political milieu, the fact of her ‘different’ ethnicity, her own personal angst. Let me take just one of the most dominant themes: spirituality. There were definite Christian themes, almost mystic themes, and then there were references to other modes of thinking for example Hinduism and Buddhism.
JMJ: Rev. Ruth, can I call you in, to first tell us a little about what Christian mysticism is and also how Buddhism and Zen Buddhism might have interested a person like nimmi who was rooted in Christian mysticism. And most importantly how it influenced her art.
REVR: My goodness! I have no idea how to condense all of that into the time we have. But let me have a bash at it. Christian mysticism is in essence a direct encounter with the transformative presence of God. It requires a quietening down of the soul, a process that some mystics have called centring (Keating, 1986; Rohr, 2009), a kind of meditational stillness akin to being mindfully present in the Now, which is the Buddhist way of putting things (Chodron, 2001; Tolle, 2001). There have been many Christian mystics, I will name but a few: Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, St Benedict, St Francis of Assisi, St Teresa of Avila, more recently Thomas Merton, Anthony de Mello, John Main, Dom Lawrence Freeman, Thomas Keating, Richard Rohr, Bede Griffiths and Swami Abhishiktananda, the latter two, both French, lived in South India for most of their lives.
THJ: MammaSmall’s diaries mention all of these.
REVR: Buddhism is a way of life based on the 4 noble truths and the 8-fold path which originated with the Buddha’s observation that there is so much suffering in this life, what with the path ahead containing sickness, old age and death and how are we to learn to live with it all? He proposed that we develop a spirit of non-attachment and that if we are able to transcend desire we will reach Nirvana or enlightenment. (Carter & Palihawadana 1992, HH Dalai Lama 1998, 2005, Walpola, 1974). Zen Buddhism is a mixture of Indian Buddhism and Taoism, which circumvents the intellect, words and logic to know the self directly and intuitively. It is of interest to us here because it principles directly informed a Japanese aesthetic called Wabi Sabi, which greatly influenced nimmi’s art, both process and product. Look, for example at the 6 am painting called ‘I have heard the sound of one hand clapping’, which is a challenge to the intellect but invokes images of solitariness, perhaps joyful aloneness, yet full of pathos.
JMJ: Tanya, MammaSmall kept a record of her research journeys through India to Japan, didn’t she in her photograph albums?
THJ: Yes. While in India it seems she interviewed an art historian called Benoy Behl (Behl, 2005,2010,2017) who had just published two volumes on art in India and a DVD of the Ajanta caves. For Buddhist art, the expression in the eyes, whether it be lovelorn or angered or peaceful and meditative, and the placement of the hands in welcome or peace and the posture of the body whether sitting or in the lotus position or taking one of the many asana postures is the very language of Indian art, steeped as it is in symbolism.
JMJ: So how was nimmi’s art influenced by Indian Buddhist art?
THJ: Well, in my understanding the whole of it was influenced by Indian art. I have a quote here from Benoy Behl (Behl,2010) who said:
‘The attitude of the (Buddhist) artist is not one of struggling against the vicissitudes of life. Instead it is of surrender, there is no valour, there is no heroism, there is only the search for the still centre of the turning world. With all the activity of life, the look is within.’
I think MammaSmall’s particular combination of interest in psychotherapy and spirituality meant that her art embodied this inward journey in an almost ritualistic way.
JMJ: But was it acceptable in the art schools of the day to do this? Kriton?
KP: Not at all! Religion and spirituality were anathema to the modern art of nimmi’s day, informed as it then was by the dictates of post-modernism. James Elkins who wrote a book called ‘The Strange Place of Religion in Art’ (Elkins, 2004) would have classified her work as ‘sincere’ and there was no place for the ‘sincere’ in the art of the time. nimmi was well aware of this as we can see in these 6 am paintings in which she expresses real angst at being out of sync with others of her time.
JMJ: And what about Japan and Wabi Sabi? What is Wabi Sabi?
KP: Leonard Koren’s opening lines to his book on Wabi Sabi state;
‘Wabi Sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.’ (Koren,1994 pg.7.)
Wabi Sabi therefore is a way of life based on simplicity, unpretentiousness and egolessness. (Koren, 2015). The closest we have to Wabi Sabi in the west is that which is called ‘rustic’, for example the aesthetic of having ‘distressed wood’ in our kitchens or on our dining tables and Welsh dressers. It is the aesthetic that informed Bernard Leach’s Pottery in Cornwall, Leach having spent many years in Japan. The Wabi Sabi aesthetic originated in the Japanese tea ceremony and has an important story behind it. Senno Rikyu (1522-1591) was a Zen tea master in the service of Toyotomi Hideyoshi whose use of very fine, gold-laced extravagant and flamboyant Chinese tea utensils in the tea ceremony was well known and represented an unashamed display of wealth and good fortune. Rikyu instead turned towards the indigenous Japanese, anonymous tea ware and attributed the same artistic value to these crude and traditionally ‘ugly’ objects. Rikyu acquired a large following as the tea ceremony ceased to be a monopoly of the rich and wealthy and became available to the common people. This simple and modest aesthetic displeased Hideyoshi who, out of jealousy, commanded Rikyu to revoke his beliefs or commit suicide. Rikyu committed suicide (Juniper, 2003; Koren 1994, 2015).
THJ: MammaSmall’s diary tells us that she was introduced to Wabi Sabi by my uncle Nick Chantarasak who had come across it in his study of architecture. I have photographs of MammaSmall visiting Rikyu’s birthplace in Kyoto and engaging in the ritual Wabi Sabi tea ceremony. I can put these on your website if you like.
JMJ: So how did the Wabi Sabi aesthetic influence nimmi’s creation of art? Kriton?
KP: First let me quote artist Mary Anne Jacob (2005) who exemplifies Buddhist philosophy when she says:
‘In the space of art dwells the ‘mind of don’t know’. The ‘empty’ mind is the creative mind…the process of art making in which the artist does not know the outcome, what the work of art will look like, or even be, is a process which shifts and changes, one of simultaneously seeing and finding a new way’. pg. 164.
So, as we have all mentioned before, nimmi’s 6 am ritual was almost a meditative act from which each morning an image would emerge.
Secondly, nimmi chose Wabi Sabi materials such as sketchbook paper and Sharpie pens, things that were everyday, considered worthless and almost ‘not presentable’. Or she used Khadi paper, which is handmade out of cotton rags and imbued with Gandhian philosophy. She used bamboo pens, Indian drawing inks, making small and incomplete paintings while her contemporaries were producing works of high colour, considerable size, quality and texture.
JMJ: What about the art itself? Was it good art? Bad art? Pop art?
THJ: Well what is good art, one might ask? If we were to take de Botton’s understanding of the functions of art, then yes MammaSmall’s art was good. It served the public well because it was accessible. But in some ways, paradoxically, the 6 am ritual of facing a blank canvas every morning, produced a plethora of ideas and images that meant that MammaSmall never stayed with one idea long enough to develop it into a complete painting. Her art was a response to the emotion of the moment, rather than a cool, rational, planned event, which perhaps is necessary to produce significant works of art. The works that flowed from her pen were so diverse that it was hard to find the ‘nimmi’ signature.
KP: I don’t really think that is true, Tanya. I think the works, though very different one from the other, are held together by the identity of your grandmother that expresses itself in everything she does. There is definitely a linear development line to all her work. It is all ‘nimmi’. If you put the 6 am paintings in date order you will see this.
JMJ: One final question to you all: why do you think nimmi’s work has been forgotten over the years? So far we have documented that it was a kind of the ‘pop art’, that it was ‘sincere’, ‘autobiographical’ and ‘spiritual’, (Elkins, 2004) which makes it somewhat of a curiosity in our humanism-driven (Pinker,2018) post-apocalyptic, material world, where we now know, almost beyond a doubt, that God does not exist. Were there other factors too?
THJ: I think I know the answer to that. When MammaSmall went to Japan in search of Wabi Sabi she was disappointed not to have found it. The Japanese aesthetic mind had been captured by the Manga movement. Even though her style was Manga-influenced, MammaSmall’s art was not flashy or polished. It was everyday and therefore not traditionally ‘beautiful’. People and museums just didn’t want to collect it. Also she just did not have the time span that other artists have had to produce work: she was 63 when she began formally studying art.
KP: Well she was in the company of other older women artists, Maria Lassnig, Etel Adnan, for example. Even Phyllida Barlow did not get a showing till late in life. And, I can think of several other reasons. nimmi was a British Indian artist and in the early part of this century artists from ethnic minority backgrounds were regularly marginalised (Wainwright, 2017). Frank Bowling, who was an Afro-Caribbean artist, a contemporary of David Hockney, was forgotten till he was 85 when the Tate gave him his first showing in July 2019. So too, Claudette Johnson. A telling documentary called, ’Whoever heard of a black artist?: Britain’s hidden art history’ documented the regular exclusion of minority ethnic people from the mainstream. Remember too that Britain was becoming increasingly hostile to ‘outsiders’. Brexit had taken shape.
LN: And if I remember my history correctly, Kriton you can correct me on this, women artists were regularly disadvantaged in relation to men artists. I unearthed an amazing poster by The Guerrilla Girls on the Advantages of Being a Woman Artist: working without the pressure of success, not having to be in shows with men, having an escape from the art world in your 4 free lance jobs, and knowing that your career might just pick up after you are 80…
JMJ: So I am guessing that being a woman, being an older woman and being a minority ethnic woman did not act in her favour. But did you all find anything that resonated with you in her art?
KP:I think she was just the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time. After all religious art has been the focal point of many an artist in days gone by, as it was for nimmi.
RevR: I totally agree with that. Unfortunately humanism was the rising ideology of nimmi’s day. But her spiritual art was quite remarkable if you look closely at it, because it blends Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity together, even in a single piece. Neti Neti is a case in point.
JMJ: You, Lorraine?
LMJ: Well we clearly see the creativity that can splurge forward when we approach art with beginner’s mind: almost everyday there was a new painting. How many artists can boast of that sort of fecundity?
JMJ: So, the plethora of her paintings and the fact that they were not afraid of emotion and were therefore accessible to the public make her worth remembering today. Well thank you indeed, thank you all for your thoughts.
This has been Woman’s Hour on July 31st 2099 the second of the series of Lesser Known Women Artists of the Previous 100 Years. I am Jenni Murray Junior. Join me tomorrow when we will celebrate the work of …(fade)
References
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Batchelor, S. 2004, Awake Meeting 2002 cited in Baas and Jacob 2004 'In the Space of Art' pg. 165, University of California Press, Los Angeles.
Behl, B. 2017, The Art of India, Frontline, New Delhi.
Behl, B. 2010, The Paintings of India, Doordarshan Archives, New Delhi.
Behl, B. 2005, Ajanta Caves: Ancient Paintings of Buddhist India, Thames and Hudson, New Delhi.
Bogost, I. 2012, Alien Phenomenology, or What it's like Being a Thing. University of Minnesota Press, London.
Carter, J. & Palihawadana, M. 1992, Buddhism: The Dhammapada. History Book Club, New York.
Chodron, P. 2001, Pure Meditation, Audible, UK.
De Botton, A. & Armstrong, J. 2017, Art as Therapy, Phaidon, London.
Elkins, J. 2004, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, Routledge, Abingdon.
Emin, T. 2019, A Fortnight of Tears, White Cube, London.
Epstein, M. 2004, "Sip my ocean: Emptiness as inspiration" in Buddha mind in contemproary art, eds. J. Baas & M.J.E. Jacob, University of California Press, Los Angeles, pp. 29.
Gosslee, J. & Zises, H. 2018, 50 Contemporary Women Artists, Schiffer Publishing Ltd., Atgen, PA.
Harman, G. 2018, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, Pelican Press, UK.
HH Dalai Lama & Cutler, H. 1998, The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. Hodder and Stoughton, London.
Highmore, B. 2002, Everyday Life and Cultural theory: An Introduction, Routledge, London.
Hutnik, N. 1991, Ethnic Minority Identity : A Social Psychological Perspective, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Hutnik, N. 2017, "Mindfulness" in Becoming Resilient: Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to Transform your Life. Harper Collins, New Delhi, pp. 269.
Jacob, M.J. 2005, "In the Space of Art" in Buddha Mind in Contemporary art., eds. J. Baas & M.J. Jacob, University of California Press, Los Angeles, pp. 164.
Johnstone, S. (ed) 2008, The Everyday, The MIT Press: Documents of Contemporary Art, New York.
Juniper, A. 1967, Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. Tuttle Publishing, Tokyo.
Keating, T. 1986, Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel, Amity House, New York.
Kerr, D. 2016, Â What Is Object-Oriented Ontology? A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to the Philosophical Movement Sweeping the Art World. Available: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/the_big_idea/a-guide-to-object-oriented-ontology-art-53690 [2018, April/6].
Koren, L. 2015, Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts, Imperfect Publishing, California.
Koren, L. 1994, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. Imperfect Publishing, California, USA.
Lacy, S. 1986, Whisper, the Waves, the Wind: Celebrating Older Women, Video Data Bank, Chicago Ill.
Pinker, S. 2018, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. London: Penguin Books.
Prodger, C. 2018, Bridgit, Tate Britain, London.
Rohr, R. 2009, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, The Crossroad Publishing Company.
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Exhibitions that Have Influenced My Work
Allbright Knox 2016, Clifford Still and Mark Bradford: Shade, Buffalo, USA.
Ashmolean 2019, Jeff Koons, The Ashmolean, Oxford.
Barbican 2018, Modern Couples, Barbican, London.
BBC 2 2019, Sean Scully: Unstoppable, BBC 2, London.
Benesse House 2019, Permanent Collection, Benesse House, Naoshima Island, Japan.
Bethlem Museum of the Mind 2016, Xavier White: Youtopia:Vision of the Past, Present and Future, Kent.
Blain/Southern 2018, Sean Scully, Blain/Southern, London.
British Council 2017, Phyllida Barlow: Folly, Venice.
Camden Arts Centre 2018, Amy Sillman: Landline, Camden Arts Centre, London.
Collyer Bristow 2018, In the Future, London.
Drawing Room 2018, Everything we do is Music, London.
Dulwich Picture Gallery 2017, Sargeant: The Watercolours, London.
Elephanta Caves 2018, Hindu and Buddhist Sculptures, Elephanta Caves, Mumbai.
Flowers 2018, Jason Larkin: Past Perfect, London.
Flowers 2018, Nadav Kander: Dark line: The Thames Estuary, London.
Fold Gallery 2018, Michaela Zimmer and Peter Welz: After White, London.
Frieze 2018, Frieze, Frieze, London.
Hepsibah Gallery 2017, Sally Hunter Fine Art, London.
Insho Domoto Museum of Fine Art 2019, Insho Domoto, Insho Domoto Museum of Fine Art, Kyoto.
Kasugataisha 2019, Permanenet Collection, Kasugataisha, Kyoto, Japan.
Kiran Nader Museum of Art 2018, Video Art, Kiran Nader Museum of Art, New Delhi.
Mall Galleries 2019, The Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours: The 207th Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London.
Manchester Art Gallery 2019, Halima Cassell: Unity, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester.
Manchester Art Gallery 2019, Leonardo Da Vinci, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester.
Maureen Paley 2017, Andrew Grassie, London.
Michael Werner Gallery 2018, Peter Doig, London.
Museum of Modern Art 2019, Claudette Johnson: I Came to Dance, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.
National Gallery of Modern Art 2018, Permanenet Collection, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
National Gallery of Modern Art MV Dhurandhar: Romantic Realism, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai.
National Portrait Gallery 2017, The Encounter: Drawings from Leonardo to Rembrandt, London.
National Portrait Gallery 2017, Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends, London.
Ontario Art Gallery 2017, The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, Toronto< Canada.
Pace Gallery 2018, Adam Pendleton, Pace Gallery, London.
Palazzo Grassi 2017, Damien Hirst: Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, Venice.
Royal Academy of Arts 2019, The 250th Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Royal Academy of Arts 2018, Bob and Roberta Smith, Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Royal Academy of Arts 2018, Charles I: King and collector, London.
Royal Academy of Arts 2018, Jasper Johns, London.
Royal Academy of Arts 2017, 249th Summer Exhibition, London.
Royal Academy of Arts 2017, Anthony Green: Painting Life, London.
Ryoanji Temple 2019, Sculpture, Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto, Japan.
Saatchi Gallery 2019, Draw Art Fair
, Saatchi Gallery, London.
Sakai City Traditional Crafts 2019, Sakai City Traditional Crafts, Sakai City Traditional Crafts, Osaka, Japan.
Serpentine Gallery 2017, Wade Guyton, London.
Somerset House 2017, Photo Lodnon, London.
South London Gallery 2018, Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London.
South London Gallery Knock Knock: Humour in Contemporary Art, South London Gallery, London.
Tate Britain 2019, The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain, Tate Britain, London.
Tate Britain 2019, Frank Bowling, Tate Britain, London.
Tate Britain 2018, Aftermath: Remembering the Great War in Britain, Germany and France, Tate Britain, London.
Tate Britain 2018, Eduard Burne Jones, Tate Brtain, London.
Tate Britain 2018, The Ey Exhibition: Impressionists in London, London.
Tate Britain 2018, Rachel Whiteread, London.
Tate Britain 2017, David Hockney, London.
Tate Britain 2017, Modigliani, London.
Tate Britain 2017, Paul Nash, London.
Tate Modern 2019, Pierre Bonnard, Tate Modern, London.
Tate, S.I. 2018, Virginia Woolf: An exhibition inspired by her writings, Cornwall.
The Art House Project 2019, Permanent Collection: James Turrell, Walter De Maria, Monet, The Art House Project, Naoshima Island, Japan.
The British Museum 2017, The American dream: Pop to present, London.
The British Museum 2017, "Hokusai: Beyond The Great Wave", .
The Chichu Museum 2019, Permanent Collection, The Chichu Museum, Naoshima Island, Japan.
The National Gallery 2017, beyond Caravaggio, Edinburgh.
The National Gallery 2017, Chris Ofili: Weaving magic, London.
The National Gallery of Art 2019, Japanese ‘New Wave: Contemporary Art of the 1980s’, The National Gallery of Art, Osaka,Japan.
The National Museum of Modern Art 2019, Permanent Collection, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.
The Sunday Painter 2018, Nicholas Pope: 7 Deadly Sins and 6 Virtues, The Sunday Painter, London.
The White Cube 2019, Tracey Emin: A Fortnight of Tears, The White Cube, London.
Venice Biennale 2017, Vive Arte Viva, Venice.
Victoria Miro 2018, Jules de Balincourt: They cast long shadows, London.
Victoria Miro 2017, Henan Bas, London.
Victoria Miro 2017, idris Khan: absorbing light, London.
Victoria Miro 2017, Tal R: Sex shops, London.
Victoria Miro 2017, Yayoi Kusama, London.
Waterhouse and Dodd 2017, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, London.
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