Artist in Residence: Vasundhara Sellamuthu

Inspired by road trips documenting architecture without architects in Tamil Nadu, India, Sellamuthu’s new paintings feature geometric facades of colourful self-built houses in playful perspectival views and doll’s house scale.

Vasundhara Sellamuthu is a Walthamstow based South Asian artist. With an interest in vernacular design and nomenclature, she considers themes of home, authorship and cross-cultural hierarchies through multimedia works. Recent facade paintings allude to twin references – self built homes in the Indian subcontinent and western abstract paintings, establishing a relationship between the wall and the canvas. Community project Useful and Beautiful draws on the Rajasthani folk kavad or portable story-box, to present poems and creative writing by residents of Walthamstow on the theme of home. Through playful inversions, her text signs borrow the language of way-finding infrastructure to consider the nicknaming of cities, often in the Global South. Artistic influences include Ellsworth Kelly, Lubna Chowdhary, and Marjetica Potrc. She is equally inspired by (often) uncredited crafts and trades professionals.