PREETHA KANNAN

My practice is a dialogue between structure and freedom, between the calculated and the instinctive. I trained as a painter, immersed in realism and abstraction. But life intervened. My sensitivity to India's environmental crises drew me into more than a decade of grassroots activism. When I returned to painting, the human-nature interface had become inseparable from my artistic concerns. My earlier work—the Gaia series—employed pointillist technique, building surfaces through layered dots to evoke living ecosystems under threat. The pandemic changed everything. Stripped back to brush, paper, and watercolour, I worked without agenda. The Metamerism and Sublime series emerged —directional strokes, swirling compositions, quick spontaneity after years of calculated application of acrylics. My current series, Veil and Terrain, represents a new synthesis. Working in mixed media—fibre tilla, naturally dyed fabrics, yarn, paper thread, acrylics—I construct densely layered surfaces where linear networks stretch across collaged fields of color. The paper threads function as both drawing and veil, mapping invisible architectures while obscuring what lies beneath. Seen from above, terrain emerges through interference: land glimpsed through atmosphere, through time, through the limits of perception itself. These works hold the tension between patience and urgency. They are landscapes of imagination built from earthly materials, demanding slow looking in a world of quick consumption.