Oliva Saha

My work is inspired by my life journey, many objects in my works represent different phases of my womanhood.

  As a girl, I wanted to reexamine my childhood and parallelly show adulthood as I grow up at times shying away from the reality and complexities of life, sexual fantasy, anxiety, and self-obsession, this escape emerges in gradual chapters in my artwork.

   I am playing with various forms that emerge out of studies in drawing objects organising around me like dry flower, caterpillar, grasshopper, teddy bear, fish, millipedes, social elements which surrounding me. I speak about my experiences of growing up experimenting with paper, making surfaces as a material dying, and staining as a method. I use watercolours, tea stain, flower colour, Alta dye, Indigo, etc.

Creating some patches, figuring out, then washing, painting, and drawing with bold and fine brush lines. Some erasing and adding something which is clearly shown, overlapping that makes a layer. Try to hide or focusing something like Sexuality, fantasy, self-obsession, and memory through these processes.

My works also speak of traditions that I have seen being lost with time, in my childhood I saw my mother, grandmother, and other women wearing Alta, a red liquid, traditionally used in Eastern India for adornment of their feet. That tradition has diminished, but it has not faded completely.  This emerges in my works as a reminiscence of my childhood.

I depict myself in my artwork in the form of its emotion and existence and my memories fuel them. They are visual images of my conversations with myself. I see my work as an autobiography where I want to make day-to-day documentation as a journal that reflects the life of the girls who grew up like me in a middle-class family.