The new exhibition at the Saskia Fernando gallery, Tilda Swims the Channel, is a layered reflection on the search for safety and sustenance. Through sculpture, painting, and performance, Chudamani Clowes bears witness to the ever-evolving global structures that shape migration today.
Clowes works with layered translucent materials to capture the sea’s duality; a beautiful vessel of hope and a site of hostility. The motifs of rice and coral anchor this exploration rice as staple of survival in the Global South and coral as a living witness to global climate crisis. Tilda rice packets are an essential material in this body of work, this ubiquitous commodity becomes a metaphor for the tangled course of trade and migration exposing how legacies of empire still persist in the modern flows of goods and people. Across painting, collage, printmaking and sculpture that echo the resilience of migratory life. Her mixed media compositions are textured and layered like the topographies of the ocean at times shimmering like the surface of the ocean while titles inspired from Japanese haikus add to the poetic sensibilities of Clowes’s artwork.
