Padma Rajendran

Region: MFA Annual

Website: http://cargocollective.com/padmarajendran

City / State: New York, NY

Wherever one goes or comes from, home remains a place to have and to work toward. Feelings of comfort and belonging hold us captive, and these senses can occur in a specific place or simply the physical walls of a house. Ritual becomes the keeper of boundaries within the home. This storytelling comes from an interior place of living two cultural lives and manifests from digging through the past of personal monuments and archived histories. Gathering personal symbols authenticates something forgotten and resurrects it to be experienced again. It allows for an alternate unfolding of events and offers a new ontology. I make visible the aftereffects of migration on domestic life for contemporary women who are simultaneously from here and elsewhere. Unseen experiences are traditionally lost to time. I reside in the disintegration and cultural loss that accrues from migration. Recollecting souvenirs and artifacts, I embrace the imagery of the woven to instigate a psychological elasticity that is still bound by opposing threads.