Shubhangi Saxena

About

Hello!
This is Shubhangi (Shilp Kalaa).

I am an Indian visual communicator & an urban designer currently based out of London. I create intricate drawings positioned at the intersection of my image making practice and a variable artistic focus.

Whether it is through my pens on paper, papermaking, found objects or visual mark-makings, the scenes that I generate give rise to a visually coded language that deeply engages with the subject matter (often to do with natural elements and lived environments around people).

My process involves active observation, deep seeing & research and I often experiment with the subject as a medium. I find myself walking through streets—eyes wide, note book in-hand—cataloguing the typologies of patterns at a scale that most eyes may miss.
The underlying thread of my practice speaks to the capturing of fascination as a way to convey complex ideas and narratives by drawing people in and inviting conversations.

Throughout the year at RCA, I worked on a site-specific project on city mosses drawing inspiration from the book ‘Gathering Moss’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The project undertakes an ethnoecological approach for understanding the moss world. It comments on the condition of cities within the Anthropocene environment. It starts with questioning… Do we see what exists around us? Do we see nature? How often do we notice it? Do we realise what surrounds us? What are we part of? Do we ever slow down? Did we forget to see? Did we forget our relation to the environment? Can we re-learn? If I did learn to see, what would I find or realise? Let’s see…

The project unfolded with multiple explorations ranging from intricate illustrations, paper making and staging experiments, some of which are evidently shown in the images…