Sahana Ramakrishnan

Lives and works in Roswell, NM

Artist statement

Animals and the stories that carry us into their mysterious inner worlds have always captivated me. Whether in Science, myth, folklore, or religion, these stories act as bridges of empathy that expand my world and perception beyond the mundanely human. Image-making is my active participation with these narratives, in which acts of imagination and contemplation test the boundaries of where one "self" begins and ends in relation to another. Art becomes a method for my sensing interdependence across species, time, and scale. In my process disorientation is generative. The confusion of interdependence across extremes of scale and time, collectives and individuals is inspiring. To contemplate the depth of our entanglement with the living world is to see reality as enchanted. My work is designed to pull viewers into this space of wonder, in the hope that this might subvert or override the lens of objectification and human supremacy that plagues our relationships with the more-than-human world. Research into myth, symbolism, and art from across the Global South plays an important role in my work, especially as someone whose own ancestral traditions of culture, ritual and storytelling have been obfuscated by generations of migration and familial breakage. My painting education is Western, but my practice grows from the roots of South Asian painting traditions, including tantric lineages that use art as an expression of scientific, spiritual, and human physiological insight. This...

Artwork