Multimedia by Eva Chaudhary
Medium: Oil Paints, Acrylic Paints, Charcoal, Turmeric, Watercolour, Gouache on Canvas, Crayons, Pencil Colours, Graphite, Ink
Size – 40 inch x 54 inch
The work explores the fluidity of personality within a colonized self, a body in flux and in conversation with the natural world. I am drawn to the multiplicity of being that you occupy as an immigrant, seeing your identity as fluctuating, unstable, and relational to its surroundings. In this unstable space, the self is never fixed or rigid but continuously made and unmade through relation, resistance, and conformity. The posture of the figure signals processes of colonization, where bodies are made to conform, are contorted, bent, subjected and displayed. Water becomes both metaphor and medium. Water bends, releases, contains and explores. It carries a contradiction. To inhabit water is to enter a state of instability, where the borders dissolve and motion becomes meaning. The body loses clarity and boundaries disperse. The body is porous. The body is in motion. The body is alive. I approach the self as relational, formed through dialogues between a physical containment and external forces leading to a liminal space between it. My practice invites a plural and flexible exploration of existence, where the body becomes a space of negotiation travelling between the colonized and the reclaiming self. The work resists closure in its inherent tension and transformation. The painting becomes a site of existing between fragmentation and formation, and of existing in a multiplied state. Art here is a space of holding transient existence. The surface holds my movement, allowing the self to exist as rhythm continually unfolding and becoming.