Nomad Roots painting series explores migration, the concept of home, and roots to a migrant or immigrant . The concepts of home and roots are inspired by my personal experience, retrospection and introspection on “The Need to Belong.” As our climate changes and due to other socioeconomic and political changes, people are migrating more than ever in this “Nomad Century”. Our hometowns are in a constant flux of change. Through my paintings I explore my attachment to the natural landscapes, the built forms, vernacular architecture or urban landscapes of the places I had called home. Some of the stories of the places I have lived are personal while some stories of migrants are from a more general context.
As I draw the maps and plans of the homes of the past from my memory or old photographs, many of those places and spaces I cannot visit anymore, I revisit them in my minds eye. When I try to compare how they looked in my memory to how they look on google earth, I try to depict the changes. The other places I still can visit I document the changes taking aerial photographs from my airplane window when I visit them.
To make these paintings I make drawings/sketches reflecting my thoughts, or a concept and then assemble these drawings together geometrically like pixelated images from my memory to create my personal Mappa Mundi. I use iconography depicting the history and culture of the places I have lived and superimpose them on hand painted maps or aerial views I have photographed during my journeys. The paintings maybe watercolor on paper , acrylic on canvas, some are mixed media collages. The paintings that are collages are made out of the numerous sketches I make and photographs I have taken or found from my family albums, textiles that I am attached to emotionally and culturally relevant to the places I have lived and belonged .
