Collection: Sama Padmini

@samapadmini

Sama Padmini (b. 2002) uses traditional figurative styles of painting and drawing in a contemporary context to explore how the sublime is manifested in the physical world. Her work is informed by ongoing research into eastern and western philosophical traditions that describe the individuals inner and outer worlds as one. Sama uses photography and digital collage techniques, using observational methods to express the unseen world through the seen. In her most recent body of work, she overlays fragmented bodies within a geometric, square format as a way to express and contain the vast range of emotions, actions and experiences that a human being will witness in a whole lifetime. The use of achromatic white oil paint on linen transfigures the portraits and is symbolic of how white is created from a spinning disc of all colours. The figures, seen from varying angles and perspectives, create abstracted, dynamic portraits of the subject that unify and simplify the complexity of what it means to be human.