Profile
Saruha Kilaru, 26, is a recent graduate from MA Print at Royal College of Art. Her practice is driven by a high sensitivity to colour and its ever-influencing presence in our environment. She explores this through the meditative processes of repetition and print as a broad sense of not just image multiplication but its deeper meanings of pressure, perception and psychology.
Saruha has worked previously with the EFA Blackburn print studio in New York, and exhibited multiple works at the Artbuzz studios in Delhi. Her works were also exhibited at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair 2021 and Southwark Park Galleries along with Espacio gallery and Fine Liquids Art Gallery in 2022 in London. She won the High Prize for artistic excellence in 2022 for her textiles. The same year, the Travers Smith Art Program also awarded her for watercolour monoprints. In 2023, her work was displayed at Artbuzz Gallery, as a Parallel venue for India Art Fair. Later in the year, she showed at the MP Birla Millennium Gallery, London at a group show “Rush to Wilderness” with Gallery Nat. Apart from the shows, she also conducted a Bookbinding workshop at Bikaner House in collaboration with IAF'23 and young collectors’ program. She recently moved to Delhi and launched Calhi Studios through their first open studio in April with her partner.
Artist Statement
As a synesthete, I see colours through people. And so, I make art which can be seen through and touched. I use materials like glass and ceramics, fabrics and sequins, prints, paper and paint to visually translate the colours I interpret of people, life and nature. These portraits of life are often times abstract and removed from their context, taking the physicality out of the space and leaving only the exaugurated sense of the feelings and colours I experienced.
My work is multi-dimensional and multi layered which makes it almost impossible to document in 2D photographs. To understand it you must experience it first hand, directly and physically. You must see through it and comeback after the lights have changed to reacquaint yourself with its ever-shifting tones. This is due to the use of colour in multiple transparencies. My work has layers, both physically in my prints and metaphorically in my glass. It captures the light of its surroundings and retraces the marks I left behind.
The meditative process of repetitive mark making, along with a high sensitivity to colour and its interplay with different mediums and materials define my visual language. I refer to the age-old theory of rasa bhava (colour and evoking emotions/feelings) from Natyashastra in this aspect, which states that colour is directly connected to our emotional awareness which in turn is a resultant of consciousness.
The use of print in an unconventional sense is a key aspect of my practice, where I see it as a variable for multiplication of an idea and its spread rather than a repetitive copy of the same image. In my practice, I use this idea of print by working in different mediums and materials to create a multidisciplinary body of work connected through a single thread of thought which revolves around perception and breaking it down to change it.
I believe it's not about what you see but where you see it from. In this matter, the biases that have formed through one’s own experiences define how they see something as simple as a colour. I experiment with these ideas through the way I choose to install my works in order to connect with and challenge my viewer's perception.
Education
Masters in Print Making
Royal College of Arts, London
BFA Painting
Amity University
Contact
saruha274@gmail.com
saruha.kilaru@alumni.rca.ac.uk
Download CV
