Tanya Goel

Collective notations of my wanderings, variations of the city's dwellings, and blueprints of its architectures, are the starting point of my current artistic practice.

After the completion of my Masters at the Yale School of Art, returning to live in the Indian capital – a city with a unique logic of architecture, now in the throes of overwhelming construction – I was at the heart of an Asian metropolis aspiring to the super built up, and witnessing a fundamental change in the way people lived. There was a desire to use materials that remained connected to those systems of consumption and power from which they were extracted. For my paintings I create pigments from debris I gather on construction sites –slivers of lead and rock, segments of limestone and concrete, bits of aluminium and ceramic tile. These I pulverize, grind and mix with binders to make paint.
Drawing forms an integral part of my practice. In Painting, it is in the form of an underpinning grid, referencing Art History, as also the Poetry and Geometry of South Asian architecture. My site-specific wall drawing at the 21st Biennale of Sydney is created with Neel pigment, a natural dye of daily household use, also used by architects to mark water level.

Recently, I have begun to experiment with frescoes upon segments of extracted stone, marble or cement from homes built in the 1950s. Plaster is applied onto defined areas, then sanded down. These perfectly smoothened burnished surfaces serve as the base for a fine-lined geometry, rendered in ink or oil pencil. Finding that the medium holds great potential, I am currently developing the frescoes into a body of work that archives a rapidly vanishing history.

On view at Artspace, 21st Biennale of Sydney, curated by Mami Kataoka until June 11th, 2018.