Degree: BA Painting
University: Open College of the Arts
Graduation Year: 2023
At face value, the makeup of Dhama Thanigasapapathy’s paintings, namely vast sprawling landscapes and the absence of people, could be seen to continue a long tradition of landscape painting. At stake, however, is not a benign depiction of rural England but something rather more pressing. Thanigasapapathy, a recent Freelands Foundation Painting Prize winner, combines an interest in sci-fi with a previous career in IT consultancy involving AI analytics to make haunting, pressing paintings. These are paintings one can’t help but see in relation to the ever-worsening climate emergency. They are paintings that one is urged to see in relation to government policy, both national and international. As images, they hold enough familiarity to recall sites and places that we’ve likely visited, been to on holiday, or maybe seen in nature documentaries. Yet the colours are awry. Reds and yellows hold the centre ground as water morphs into fiery lava and the skies, full of heat, verge on collapse. A quiet ecology drives Thanigasapapathy’s paintings, asking us to rethink the familiar, the speed of climate breakdown, and perhaps, just perhaps, art’s role in shaping opinion moving forward.
Dhama gained a first-class BA (Hons) Painting from the Open College of the Arts in 2023, also winning the prestigious 2023 Freelands Painting Prize. Dhama is a London based British artist whose work is informed by her interest in science, science fiction, psychology, futurism and her life-long fascination with the awesome power and chaotic beauty of extreme climatic phenomena. Her perspective is unusually enriched by a prior career in IT Consultancy and telecommunications which involved analysis of the impacts of artificial intelligence, ubiquitous connectivity and other revolutionary technologies.
She uses painting as a way to relate to the changing environment, allowing the flows, drips and chemical interactions of paint to echo natural processes. She spends many hours drawing, painting and photographing elements of the natural environment such as water, geological formations and weather effects. The semi-figurative speculative landscape paintings are imaginative renderings of future possibilities where extreme climatic forces transform, dissolve and erase constructs over time and space. The paintings are based on a complex layering of reality, imagination, multiple overlapping memories, cultural stories and emotional drivers including unease and nostalgia.