Parvathi Nayar
Contemporary visual artist and writer Parvathi Nayar currently bases her studio in Chennai, after living and making art in cities such as Singapore, London and Jakarta. Parvathi is known for her multidisciplinary art, centred on complex drawing practices, video, installations, painting, text and photography. Her hand-drawn black-and-white graphite artworks are multifaceted explorations of the spaces in which we live, often through the prism of science and technology. Parvathi’s art talks about different engagements with our environment, and the philosophies of inhabiting them. Her work engages with urban memory and sustainability.
​A key theme through her work is Water in all its aspects – as an integral part of the environment, as water bodies, as a contested resource, as the source of fauna and flora, as well as a substance of meditative and metaphorical power, said to be born in the stars. Parvathi is a founder-member of the art collective The Hashtag#Collective. She plays an active role - and is deeply committed to supporting - the emerging renaissance of the contemporary in Chennai.
​Parvathi’s works have appeared at many significant solo and group shows and venues around the world, including the Kochi Muziris Biennale, The Chennai Photo Biennale, the CPB Biennale (Jakarta), the Singapore Art Museum and the ‘We Are Ocean’ programmes in Europe. She pioneered the form of ‘drawn sculpture’, as in the seminal 20-foot-high 3-d drawing ‘A Story of Flight’ at JayaHe art programme, Mumbai international airport.
Parvathi is poet, fiction writer, and features correspondent who has written extensively on the arts for publications such as National Geographic, The Hindu, The Business Times, Singapore and The Jakarta Post. As a public speaker, her TEDx talks include ‘Seeing the world through Different Lenses’ (2016).
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Parvathi received her Masters in Fine Art from Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London, on a Chevening scholarship. She was the Best Outgoing Student, Bachelors of Fine Art, Stella Maris College (Chennai, India) and Ranked 2nd in Tamil Nadu for the Std X exams.
