Biography
The question I continually respond to as an artist is how an ordinary object can be transformed into something special, and how everyday experiences acquire new meaning through the processes of art-making. I have developed a sustained interest in collecting discarded everyday objects. My art practice investigates the transformative potential of empty pharmaceutical blister packets. The value we attach to used pharmaceutical blister packs depends in good part on our understanding of their past function. They are, once emptied, loses both functionality and meaning and are simply discarded as waste (300 million tonnes are produced annually, with 50% ending up as landfill). From my perspective each punctured surface of a blister pack is the trace of someone’s healing and an implied act of faith - a quasi-religious belief in the invisible power of scientific knowledge. I find this moving. It is the implied sensation of touch that motivates everything I do and this realisation has informed six years of my artistic experimentation with collected reserve of over 550,000 discarded blister packs.
My practice elevates these empty packs to the level of impact-oriented sculptures and installations by drawing upon the sacred philosophies of my Hindu upbringing, the language of 1960s minimalist art practices and the repetitive yet non-identical arrangement techniques. In all these experiments the packaging becomes more than landfill. They take on a significance of their own, become aesthetically special and valuable experiences, and I believe the transformation that occurs is an enhancement of, and re-sensitisation to, the everyday sensibilities involved when taking pills and throwing away an empty packet. Moving between everyday objects, art, aesthetics, value and experience, my work asks how we ‘are ’in the world?
My association with Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford has had a significant impact on my interests (since 2023). I find myself as a practice-based investigator responding to the special, semi-sacral feelings we increasingly experience in relation to art, rituals, and health. So, my artistic re-imagining situates at the social intersection of contemporary art, traditional belief systems, everyday experiences of medication, sustainability and environmental urgency caused by medical waste in a relationship that is meaningful in present-day. Ultimately, my aim is to prompt viewers’ for a closer, more provisional interaction with ordinary objects like an empty blister pack - as sites of deeper meaning when treated ‘sacredly’.