Tilda Swims the Channel: Chudamani Clowes

In ‘Tilda Swims the Channel', Chudamani Clowes reimagines the sea – that vast threshold between safety and uncertainty. Through the act of passage across the sea she reflects on migration, ecological precarity and the enduring legacies of empire. Like coral – millions of years old and continuously propagating through the currents – people too have always moved in search of safety and sustenance. Today these movements are charged with a new urgency; political instability, economic inequalities and the intensifying crisis of climate change. Working with layered translucent materials Clowes’s practice confronts these realities directly, holding in tension the great beauty of the seas as a source of hope and its simultaneous role as a site of loss for the many migrants that embark on a perilous journey.

Rice and coral recur as central motifs; rice as the staple food of many in the Global South, coral as the ocean’s sentinel, its bleaching an early sign of planetary danger. Both circulate globally carried by ships and currents, their survival entangled with human histories of movement and extraction. Clowes incorporates Tilda rice packets, transforming this ubiquitous commodity into both material and metaphor. The choice of the rice bags – their synthetic appearance, bright blue and purple hues and ties to the South Asian diaspora community anchor the works in the material realities of migrant life.

Working across painting, collage, printmaking and sculpture Clowes assembles layered fragile surfaces that echo the instability and resilience of a migratory life. Tissue paper, rice paper, printed materials are torn, reassembled and embedded forming complex topographies that shimmer like the ocean’s surface and seduces like the ocean depths. These mixed media compositions evoke the turbulence of the seas as both a site of passage and peril. Her titles inspired by Japanese haikus extend this poetic sensibility by distilling the vast emotions into evocative titles that offers a moment of reflection amidst chaos. Through these tactile and sedimented processes Clowes makes visible what is often submerged – layered histories of migration, environmental degradation and colonial continuities – rippling beneath the waves of our shared seas.

In the artwork ‘The Floating Rice House’, Clowes constructs a shelter enveloped in tapestries, recalling the garments of the mahouts once exhibited with elephants in imperial spectacles across London. Through this gesture she exposes how colonial histories of display echo in today’s global cycles of labour and migration. In Clowes’s interpretation the staple food of rice becomes a fragile membrane of survival and a metaphor for global movements; both voluntary and involuntary.

‘Grappling in the Dark’ recalls the perils of migrants crossing the Channel on rickety inflatable boats through the figure of a monkey clutching her young. In this imagery she simultaneously invokes the destruction of natural habitats that endanger non-human species. Clowes’s painting ‘Aerogramme’ adds another layer to the story of migration, recalling the delicate paper that once traversed borders to keep families connected. These tactile forms evoke the fragility and complexity that govern diasporic life, sustained across distance through memory and care. Pressing together cookie cutters the artist creates ceramic busts of the wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the series titled ‘Churchill, You Coral Man’. In her representation of Churchill, Clowes confronts the complexities of colonial violence, asking how history is forgotten and reinstated. 

Migration emerges in Clowes’s imagination not only as a human story but also an ecological one–of corals drifting across oceans, of sacks of rice travelling in cargo ships, of habitats destroyed in the wake of a voracious global appetite. This body of work acknowledges these layered crossings, situating them within the larger structures of empire, economy and climate crisis that continue to shape who moves, who must move and who is denied entry.