UAL Postgraduate Show
MA Fine Art: Painting
Camberwell College of Arts, London, UK
2026
Exhibited works- I live by your grace - I, I live by your grace - II, I rise etching and aquatint prints, Play Along etching and aquatint print
I Live by Your Grace is a devotional love letter to the universe. Through this project an attempt was made to materialise an experience that cannot be fully explained: the dissolution of the ego, the opening of the heart, and the expansion of consciousness into a state of cosmic union. Inspired by my guru, Eastern philosophy and Tantric understandings of energy, the work traces the movement from the lowest chakras to the highest - an eruption of life force that culminates in transcendence, where dualities dissolve into oneness. It is a celebration of life, surrender, and the sublime. It is an exploration of the otherworldly experience.
The works exhibited include paintings and etching prints. The paintings were created using acrylic, acrylic markers, charcoal, coloured pencils, oil paint, and thread on unstretched canvas, the painting possesses a performative quality. The entire work was process-led; I never knew what the final image would become. I began with instinctive gestural charcoal marks, allowing intuition rather than planning to guide each decision. These confident, immediate gestures sought to embody a state of ecstatic presence and mystical union.
A downward-pointing triangle appears within the composition as a symbol of Shakti - the primordial feminine energy, the source of creation and transformation. Throughout the making process, the unstretched canvas was repeatedly turned, reversed, and suspended. Fluid acrylic paint was allowed to travel freely across the surface, creating drips through an intentional surrender of control. The canvas was then inverted so that these drips moved upwards, symbolically reversing gravity and suggesting an ascent towards the sky, consciousness, and liberation.
This continual physical engagement with the surface became an essential part of the work. The painting was rotated, rolled, lifted, suspended, and activated through movement, allowing bodily energy to become embedded within the surface itself. Oil paint was mixed with excessive white spirit so that it bled deeply into the canvas, creating unexpected textures as the solvent evaporated and only the pigment remained - a material metaphor for the dissolution of the ego, leaving only love. Dry charcoal was fixed with spray so that it dispersed and flowed across the surface, while paint was splattered and allowed to respond to gravity rather than complete control.
The work seeks to evoke the sublime not through representation but through immersive material experience, where colour, scale, movement, and gesture become vehicles for encountering the numinous. The painting privileges lived experience over image, encouraging viewers to encounter it through movement, proximity, and bodily awareness.
The colourful circles scattered throughout the works suggest moments of centredness amidst life’s continual dualities. They evoke the inner point of stillness that exists within experiences of suffering and joy, masculine and feminine, chaos and harmony. Rather than resolving these opposites, the work embraces their coexistence and celebrates the vitality that emerges through them.
Thread extends beyond the painted drips, allowing colour to continue flowing beyond the limits of the canvas. These delicate extensions open the work into surrounding space, dissolving the boundary between painting and environment while introducing a sense of sacred openness. Likewise, the irregular edges of the unstretched canvas intentionally reject formal perfection.
Suspended freely within space rather than stretched against a frame, the painting resists being experienced as a static object. It responds to air, light, and the movement of those around it, gently shifting and breathing within its environment. It exists as a living presence rather than a fixed image - an energetic field that invites contemplation and embodied experience.
Ultimately, I Live by Your Grace asks what painting can become when it is no longer confined to representation or objecthood. Can a painting be experienced as an event, a ritual, or a sacred space? Can it embody energy rather than merely depict it? Through process, material transformation, and surrender, the work seeks not to represent transcendence but to become an experience of it.
It is an attempt to break the limitations of “painting”. What painting can be, what it can do. Can it be more than a painting?