Details
| First Name | Kasturi |
| Last Name | Kiritharan |
| Username | kasturi-k |
| Website | |
| Region | Edinburgh & The Lothians |
| Disciplines | Painting |
| Themes | Abstract, Botanical, Environment, Figurative, Landscape, Narratives |
Statement
| Statement | The mercurial and alchemical quality of paint guides the work I make. Though I begin my paintings with a rough image in my mind, my works are never fully planned and I let my intuition lead my hand. My most recent body of work is inspired by some of my encounters in the natural world, featuring pagan animals, close-up insects, quiet landscapes and anonymous figures floating between the thresholds of past and present. I am also deeply inspired by the painters that came before me, often painting studies of their work as a base layer, and building my own ideas on top of them to transform the image. Through this, I pay homage to those who have influenced my visual language, letting their work both figuratively and literally shape my work. |
Biography
| Biography | Kasturi Kiritharan (b.1998, London, based in Edinburgh) received her BA in English Literature in 2020 and in 2024 she completed the Year Long Painting Course at Leith School of Art. Following on from this, Kasturi continues to explore her interests in poetic expression and the blurring of the imagined and the real in her artistic practice, with oil paint as her primary medium. By building up thin washes of oil paint, scratching into the surface, sanding, staining and re-layering, Kasturi investigates what it might feel like to retrieve a memory: edges fade, colours overlap, textures transform, details sharpen or get buried. This process-led approach encourages her to stay open and speculative, allowing images to reveal themselves slowly and let nature take its course. Her current work reveres simple, intimate moments of ordinary life, allowing memories captured in her sketchbook or camera roll to re-emerge through the material possibilities of paint and surface. |