Divya Sharma MRSS

Divya Sharma is a London based British Indian artist with a Masters’ from the Royal College of Art 2021 and a BA in Fine Art from UAL in 2019. She founded the Neulinge Collective (a South Asian Womens' Collective) and the Post Colonials Collective and has curated five major shows. In 2023 Divya was awarded the two juried New Contemporaries shows in the UK and qualified for the 17th Textile Triennial in Lodz. She was part of the juried NAE Open 2023. She was the CroydonBID artist of 2024 and three of her works were installed as banners in London for a year. In 2024, she was selected for the Collect Open and has been selected for the juried Wells Contemporary Art Show. She received the Arts Council Funding in November 2023.

Divya’s work is about place-making and imagining, and she is interested in reimagining through the labour of her tapestries, vanished homelands, hidden civilisations, and forgotten peoples and their ignored pasts. Exploring collective memory, ancestral knowledge and the representation of femininity, her tapestries draw on the socio-political and cultural heritage of her native Tamil culture to reflect on universal values. They are constructed taking inspiration from symbols, fantastical events and imagined histories that in turn create new narratives. They create a sense of atmosphere, have a presence, are mysterious, primal and made from yarn on hemp fabric. Weaving memories, myths, rituals, and dreams into the mosaic of everyday life, her works explore her historically rich and multi-layered culture, at the crossroads of different realities, migrations and colonial legacies. Her research spans ancestral knowledge and traditional practices, as well as more recent histories.https://www.instagram.com/divyasharmastudio/