Familiar / Familial by N.Divya

Familiar/Familial
A traveller of sorts through a journey of her own recollections, N. Divya has accumulated a data base of memories akin to a treasure box of metaphoric memorabilia. Sorting through
this overflowing space of archived personal lived experiences, she delivers through her works the idea of loss and hope, through reimagined environments and configured still-lives.
Displaced through geographies that divided her family during her childhood, and with home becoming a suitcase between two worlds, her way to retain place and time came from how she would imprint details - physical and emotional - to be hers forever through these mental recordings.
This bag of memories, fragments carried in her minds eye, becomes rather like an assortment of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that has no conclusive final "picture" - yet which strangely belong together. In these images that she elaborately paints - with details that entice you to look
more closely-Divya gives you clues through which to understand the subtext that lies outside of the literal. These images act as triggers of recall as you engage with familiar things painted in these works, from an ordinary existence of everyday living.
Familiar/Familial is therefore about the world of encountering - where through a journey of living you are confronted with realities that hold you alert and make you question. No story is recorded and no conclusion is offered. The artist instead merely places before us an array of associations - leaving each of us to consider for ourselves these tracts of memory we harvest, and were we find our collective imprints through shared histories.

Rekha Rodwittiya
Baroda 2023