2024
Photo documentation of an hour long performance piece, 2024
For Bhui Agua, a pop-up show with a fellow artist Sarah Levia, I got the opportunity to bring focus to Kathmandu, specifically the Kathmandu of my memories. A desire to experiment and to fundraise for this year’s flood victims in Nepal guided me as I put together my half of the show.
I anchored my visual language within the objects found in places of worship in my hometown of Kathmandu. I grew up visiting hindu temples and buddhist stupas. As much as these places held spiritual value they also functioned as a social gathering space for people in the community.
As a way to further this work I got to do a performance that anchored itself in stillness rather than movement. The audience in Providence completed the piece by interacting with the ceramic replicas of objects from my hometown of Kathmandu. Along with the performance and installations I had 4 plates and 4 mugs for sale. 50% of the proceeds from those sales went to a grassroots flood relief fund organized by Shanta Nagarkoti.
2023
Entangled in Time, 2023
Earlham College
In this durational performance I am exploring the struggle of upholding binary identities while attempting to collapse time. I am committed to ceramics in exploring issues around identity because of the material’s simultaneous ability to be rigid and fragile. The various pokes and pushes on the walls of the bottomless shells signal the struggle of negotiating boundaries of identity. The use of solid black and white colors for the shells aim to communicate the rigid binaries within which I have been forced to understand my gender.
The circular path taken in the performance is referencing the Buddhist wheel of becoming, better known as Bhavachakra. Bhavachakra is a visual representation of the buddhist view of life which states that existence is a cycle of life, death and rebirth. The burying that takes place at the end of the performance is another attempt to play with and collapse time.
2022
Formulations
Earlham College
Durational performance piece exploring the the rigid yet fragile nature of binary gendered norms and how that translates to an individual’s experience of their body.