Note: I understand that the artist statement evolves as learning progresses. I have therefore highlighted in Bold the changes in my artist statement from Unit 1 to Unit 2.

nimmi:         Artist Statement

Mediums:       oil, acrylic, Indian drawing inks, pen, felt tip, bitumen gold leaf, iPad

Topics :           psychological, spiritual and political issues, landscape, still life, the ageing body, sexuality, divinity, resilience, flourishing, positive emotion.

My central concerns are psychological, spiritual and political:  issues such as ageing, sexuality, divinity, resilience, flourishing and positive emotion. I am currently interested in the theme of Transformation looking at how living beings recover from adversity, use adversity as gift and transform themselves into proliferate, fecund and thriving human beings. Influenced by the findings of positive psychology, I am keen to portray buoyancy, flexibility and adaptability where I see it both in nature and in human conditions. Thus my paintings juxtapose positive emotion as it arises out of conditions of stress and tension.

 I grapple with the problem of representing the ‘unrepresentable’ in language that can be easily read and/ or emotionally responded to by the everyday viewer. I am a figurative artist and an abstract artist, eschewing conceptual art as inaccessible to the viewing public. I am concerned to meet the innate self-actualising need for beauty within the person in the street.  My art attempts to act as therapy, embodying messages of hope and resilience gleaned from my observations of nature and of human living and loving. In this vein too, I paint imagined landscapes, which are essentially ‘emotions recollected in tranquillity’: dark wet, tropical forests of Kerala and Goa, in India, the country of my origin. My paintings are intense and intensely colourful. And often though not always an Indian motif arises from my collective unconscious. One person called my art ‘an erotic replacement’. Another called my figurative style ‘naïve expressionism’.

 I believe that art is an intimate conversation between the artist and the viewer: when aspects of my life resonate with meanings and attributions within the viewer’s experience, then art has served its therapeutic function. Thus autobiography has become important to me. The political too has surfaced within my art more poignantly as recent reports of social inequality have highlighted the adversity and stresses experienced by ethnic minority people in the UK who, despite these, have learned to be resilient and to flourish. My experience as a therapist comes to the fore as I consider many clients’ struggles with the enemy within i.e. addiction.

 I use many materials: oils, acrylics, Indian drawing inks, bamboo pen, felt tip and the iPad. I continue to explore the use of bitumen and gold leaf. Because of their contrasts in materiality, the juxtaposition of the two creates a strange and exciting ambience. I have also recently used found objects and collage in the creation of my paintings. My iPad has taken a central place as a document of the various artistic decisions that I make in creating an artwork. Indeed they become the artwork itself. I have thus learned to sew video material together into meaningful wholes, sometimes as a response to other artists’ work, at other times in response to my own artist dilemmas.