Sanemi Shetty.
A 23-year-old Mumbai-born, London based student artist, Sanemi Shetty, exhibited her artwork, at the recently concluded Chelsea Art Society's 77th Annual Summer Exhibition, at the Chelsea Old Townhall, London. The Chelsea Art Society has been in existence since 1910 and is run by artists. They exhibit the works of established and promising emerging artist.
Sanemi's artwork, âOne for Sorrow, Two for Change', is a detailed ornate 2D, colour pencil drawing, that was chosen from thousands of submissions. It is a part of her on going current series, âFeelings of Girlhood', which is a direct reference to her films and photographs, exploring themes of transformation, death, existence of God, religion and purity.
A graduate of U.K. based Bath School of Art, Film and Design, Sanemi Shetty's art practice has transformed from her earlier art works, where she played a one-woman army directing and conceptualizing self-portrait art films and photographs, constructing detailed sets and costumes. Materiality plays an important role in all of her paintings and drawings.
In her present series, swans on a gilded golden background, crows surrounded by intricate foliage are a key symbol to her practice, where she abstracts femininity and represents it by birds. Her compositions are notably ornate and purposefully decorative as an ode to her cultural heritage.
She uses ancient folktales and scriptures, revisiting stories that have historically framed women through a twofold lens, that of virtue and respect. Her art explores what it feels like to be a woman in her early 20s and despite the cultural specificity of her work, Sanemi has managed to capture a wider global audience for her work and abstracted Indian stories into a globally shared emotional facet of girlhood, transcending cultures.
Apart from her recent exhibition at the Chelsea Old Town Hall, she has had exhibitions in and around London like the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, Mall galleries, Centrespace Gallery, signalling a steady growing presence in the UK's emerging art scene.
She also has plans to exhibit across galleries in Mumbai and further her practice in London. Her research-based abstraction of these age-old stories and narratives while not compromising their integrity stories marks her as one of the emerging artists working in visual storytelling today.
Commenting on her experience so far, Sanemi Shetty said, "My work is essentially rooted in my culture, but I have been seeing a pattern of my work resonating with a larger audience opening up discussions about femininity, and what it means to be a woman and the shared experience of girlhood regardless of ethnicity." She further states that her work is also somewhat a reflection of what it is to be a young girl growing up alone in a foreign land and how it impacts people's perspective about her. The struggles and the grief, the good and the bad.
Her upcoming work is a collaboration with an Ethiopian graphic designer sharing experiences of what it is to be a woman and retelling conventional stories for a contemporary international audience.
Insta: @sanemi_art
Portfolio: https://sanemiravishetty.co.uk/
e-mail : sanemishetty@gmail.com
