Artmaking has always provided me with a space to condense and analyze my feelings and emotions and help me express various inexplicable feelings, thoughts, and emotions.

Living with a chronic illness and witnessing my family’s struggle with their disabilities made me realize early on in my life that disability does not impact just one person but the entire family. I see disability as a fog enveloping and coloring everything, every relationship around me, its effects seeping into all aspects of my existence. Often, my disability experiences are so perplexing and intense that artmaking becomes the only way for me to acknowledge and analyze my experiences and cut through that fog. My artworks witness how I experience disability both inside and outside—at an emotional level and in terms of my relationships with my environment and the people around me.

My current body of work is essentially narrative, with an autobiographical inclination to record things and events as I see them, such as childhood memories and objects related to everyday experiences. In the trajectory of my artmaking practices, I locate myself and analyze how the world around me impacts me and vice versa. I often see my artworks as subjective renderings of major life events, and they become my way of knowing myself and reflecting upon those experiences.

Website: shivani-bhalla.com

Instagram: Shivanibhalla_art

Shivani Bhalla