At the art studio in her Mulund home, painter-animator Hemali Vadalia is everywhere. Life-size oil portraits—some completed, others still works-in-progress—cover the sky blue walls of the room. In one self-portrait titled Yaad, Vadalia is fast asleep, her legs curled up in foetal position. In another, she rekindles a forgotten memory from school, when she was part of a prayer group. Except that this choir is only made up of doppelgangers, each bearing a different personality, but all Vadalia nonetheless. There’s also an unfinished painting on an easel, where her half-smiling reflection stares right through. “It’s easy to paint myself... I don’t have to hire a model. All I need to do is look into the mirror. The focus is not the subject, it’s the story,” Vadalia, 38, says.

In the room is a DIY mannequin of her upper body she made using a technique similar to the one adopted in papier-mâché. Only here, Vadalia enlisted the help of a relative to use black tape over a tee that she was wearing to mould it to her shape, later stuffing it with fibre. It helps her capture the scale of her subject in her work.