Soumiya Lakshmi Krishnaswamy
In the Garden of My Ancestor Ts'ui Pên, 2024
Oil on Canvas
36x36
 
My work is process and materials based, decoding our humanity and communication over time, space, culture. I am obsessed with mortality and struggle with obsessive/compulsiveness. Control versus chaos. A child of immigrants, outsider to 2 worlds, I can problem solve and see connections everywhere. My marks come from researching imagery from cave paintings to Indian kolam to kids' drawings. I explore these via the process, which becomes the subject. The marks become symbols for human experience. The random is the system, a chaos theory. The marks feel familiar, triggering a visceral reaction through the body, into a mindscape, a place beyond words and time, full of memories, stories, fantasy.