Ambiguity Abstraction

Visual artist Sahaya Sharma is hoping to ‘make a lot of art that makes humans think and feel’. She seems to be heading in the right direction…

How did you fall in love with abstract art?

SS: I think when you can’t stop doing something and want to be with it or keep doing it all the time, you organically start falling in love with it. Such was the case with abstract art. My catalyst into abstraction was Maznah Sheriff, my studio professor at Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, where I was pursuing a BFA in Fine Arts. One afternoon in August 2013, I was showing Maznah my form based works - iguanas on bikes, donkeys on maps, skulls with roses and tigers on female bodies and so on - and her concluding statement was, “In every work, I don’t see the form but just your sharp use of color. Have you thought about going into abstract art?” Extremely perplexed, I asked myself, “What sense does abstraction even make?” I made my way to the closest art store and purchased an empty drawing book, 42 pages thick, and filled it in less than a week. The acrylics and color pencils captured galactic explosions on paper one after the other… and there has been no looking back since!

Later that year I lost my grandfather and it was around that time that I decided to club these 42 paper studies into an ambitious scale of 7x9 ft and called it ‘Museum of Consciousness’ (named after an album by the psychedelic electronic band called Sphongle). Six months later, I made an antithesis to the painting (Trespassing Transcendence, 7x9 ft, Mixed media on canvas, 2014). It was inspired by the art and energy fields of two of my studio mates - Claire and Aparajita.

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