Bio:

Shruti Shankar (b. Chennai, India) is an inter-disciplinary artist and educator working across drawing, artist books, textile, video, and installation. In her practice, she marks a deliberate shift from the finality of a product to the meditative rhythms of process. She investigates how everyday routines evolve into meaningful rituals, constructing systems of self-imposed guidelines and frameworks of safety and structure, precisely to identify moments in which those rules must be broken. She received her BFA from Denison University and her MFA at the Ohio State University and has exhibited her work across the Midwest at 100,00,00 Space, 12 Gates, Roy G Biv Gallery, Blockfort Gallery, Urban Arts Space and Eastern Michigan University. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Brew House Arts in Pittsburgh, PA.

Artist Statement:

My practice is rooted in drawing and driven by a series of ongoing projects that embrace the rough, the uncertain and the unresolved. I touch my way around the tension and thickness of a form that refuses the desire to answer, engaging drawing as an expansive practice with which to question ideas around bodies and borders. My work folds, expands and collapses, moving between drawing, book, textile, sculpture and video. In this space between dimensions, I want to disrupt that boundary where our bodies might end and the world begins. My body becomes both tool and material and with it, I create compositions, images, gestures, and traces. Sometimes, my body disappears - it becomes landscape, animal, and/or pattern – offering connections between the macro- and the microscopic. In the studio, I am driven by a compulsion to make – to labor over the work, willing it to speak to me, in time. This impulse sustains my practice. In this way, what begins as routine becomes ritual. It enters the studio and becomes a part of my practice. Through processes of cutting, layering, fragmentation and abstraction, I look for what rises to the surface, revealing itself, what remains beneath, refusing to be revealed and what lies in-between.