About
Artist Statement
My practice engages photography and the genre of Indian Miniature painting. UK-born with Indian ancestry, my formal art training was influenced by Western visual traditions. Since 2021 however, a significant shift has occurred, as I have been apprenticing under master painter Ajay Sharma. Each spring, I visit his studio in India to undertake rigorous learning in Indian Miniature Painting fundamentals. Relatively little has changed over centuries, in how materials are made, techniques followed, and how knowledge is transmitted from master to student, for example, about drawing instruction, achievement of technical skills or differences in stylistic conventions between schools of painting. Having been immersed for many years in legacies indebted to my Western art training, I am embracing this opportunity to deeply explore and penetrate my Asian artistic heritage.
Broadly, my work focuses on three themes: rural landscapes or elements of the natural world such as plants, seeds or trees; femininity and conceptions of the self within an aging female body; and representations of cyclical patterns or rhythms in nature and the cosmos. Weaving through these areas is an engagement with Western and Indian notions of beauty, and Eastern perspectives on what is truth, in relation to a corporeal understanding of space and time. A reverence for the ritualistic processes of craft, with a respect for detail, is imperative within my work.
Biography
Madahar graduated from Winchester School of Art/Southampton University with a BA in Fine Art in 1999 and with a graduate scholarship award, from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University in Boston, US, with an MFA in Studio Art in 2003. She has exhibited internationally in group and solo shows, including at Aspex Gallery, Harewood House, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, US. She was awarded the 2008/09 Bradford Fellowship in Photography by the National Science and Media Museum. Madahar has received commissions from organisations including the Glynn Vivian Gallery, FACT, Film and Video Umbrella and Photoworks. Her work is held in collections such as the Government Art Collection, Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, the MIT Art Collection, the V&A Museum and the Yale Center for British Art.
Madahar is represented in the US by Anderson Yezerski Gallery.