This series of Paintings is on Migration, changing Ecologies, transformations in landscapes, and Memory. Our hometowns are in a constant flux of change due to natural causes like climate change, rapid urbanization, and socio-political reasons. Borders close, and sometimes humans can never return Home. Migratory birds or butterflies travel every year in their life cycle, beyond borders to survive. Like the Sandhill cranes of the Bay Delta, or the Garza/Heron in Venezuela, I document the natural and manmade world around me and research the places my old homes used to be. I try to understand and visualize the transformations in the landscapes, histories, economies, culture, and vernacular architecture that have changed over the years. How native plants, animals, and indigenous people are coping with the changing climate, and the communities struggle to retain their individual cultural identities. I make numerous sketches, then assemble the sketches into my paintings.
36″x48″
12″x16″
As our climate changes and due to other socioeconomic and political changes, people are migrating more than ever in this “Nomad Century”. Through my paintings, I explore my attachment to the natural landscapes, the built forms, vernacular architecture, and urban landscapes of the places I have 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.
My current work explores the concepts of home, community, and roots and how they shape our identity. I investigate themes of nostalgia, human relation to spaces, man-made built forms, landscapes, and how the natural world influences the human psyche. I am in the process of working on a series that maps memory, identity, my family’s migration, culture, and history through mythology and folk-art imagery depicting flora, fauna, landscapes, and architecture of the places I have lived; creating identity maps in a painting series called “My Mappa Mundi.” The concepts of home and roots are inspired by my personal experience, retrospection, and introspection on “The Need to Belong.”
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 .