DIVYA SHARMA

Cluster Exhibitor | Cluster Contemporary | 2022

 

Acrylic yarn on Hemp Fabric | 2022

Acrylic yarn on Hemp Fabric | 2022

Acrylic yarn on Hemp Fabric | 2022

 

Divya Sharma is a London based artist from South India. She has a MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (2021) and a BA in Fine Art from the University of Arts London in 2019 (Wimbledon College of Arts).

Her work reflects her lived experience, with the narratives in her projects exploring to re-imagine the notion of ‘belonging’. At the heart of her practice is the idea of hybridity, and the (naive) insistence that inter, and intra-nationalities can make futures in which we are not opposites but extensions and additions. In her tufted tapestries indigenous beliefs and the vernacular codices are presented through the lens of living in different spaces, cultures, and languages. 

 
 
 

Divya is one of the founding members of the Neulinge Collective. She is the founder and host of the ARTiculate podcast. Her shows in 2022 include “Home Ground” in the ArtChowk Gallery in Karachi, Pakistan, New Contemporaries Juried Competition show in the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull  and the South London Gallery, London. She has also qualified to participate in the 17th International Triennial in Poland in the Textile Museum of Lodz till April 2023. She was the recipient of the RCA Gilbert Bayes Scholarship Prize in 2021.

 
 

Acrylic yarn on Hemp Fabric | 2022

 

Acrylic yarn on Hemp Fabric | 2022

 
My tufted piece for the “Entanglement and More” exhibition is called ‘Attakorae’. This work is about place-making and imagining. It is about a place that once (might have) existed, but no more. No one involved in its making has ever seen it, much less lived there, and likely they never will. Its primary identity is in the place-making labour. It is also a work about loss. I am interested in the preoccupation with loss as it manifests itself in the fascination with vanished homelands, hidden civilizations, and forgotten peoples and their ignored pasts. How does one remember a lost place? What trajectories does imagining take to summon into existence a world that is no longer available. Under what circumstances does the past return to haunt the present as the vanished, the submerged, and the hidden? Are we not always already losing the past?

My Place-world has been brought into existence through my tapestry as way of constructing the past, a way of weaving fictional social traditions and, in the process, reinventing personal and social identities.
— DIVYA SHARMA
 
 

Acrylic yarn on Hemp Fabric | 2022