Divya Balivada

I often return to the concept of Saṃsāra, a Sanskrit word referring to the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, marked by suffering (duḥkha). My practice acknowledges pain, repetition, and impermanence, while also opening the possibility for presence, release, and transformation.

Interviewed by Claire Zakiewicz

Divya Balivada is an Indian artist based in London, currently completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. She paints onto canvas using a self-built loom, that creates a continuously rotating surface, enabling an unbroken stream of mark-making. This cyclical, relational process invites a state of becoming that extends beyond materiality and selfhood, without a clear beginning or end. Her work explores cyclicity and impermanence through the emotional echoes of lived experiences, particularly those rooted in trauma and gendered socialisation.

For Divya, the studio becomes a space for reclamation and reconfiguration, where she questions dominant inscriptions of identity and selfhood. The recursive process of palimpsestic mark-making becomes the rhythm of urgency. Gestures accumulate and congeal into dense clusterings of overwhelm. Her use of colour asserts presence. It does not represent but articulates how she feels through a form that resists words. Repetition, abstraction, and gesture allows her to access states that resist linearity. Working with a self-built loom, she engages in cyclical mark-making as a ritual of return.

Instagram: @divbalivada

Claire: Your drawings feel deeply instinctual and physical – how do you prepare for a session in the studio?

Divya: At times, it begins with a period of stillness – either I meditate or sit in silence with the material. Sometimes, there is an urgency to express. In essence, I don’t have a predetermined process. I attune to what’s happening inside me emotionally or somatically. The process is improvisational and charged with my emotions. Working on the loom, especially, I allow the repetition of gestures to bring me into a kind of embodied surrender where the marks emerge from a subconscious urgency rather than from conscious direction.

Claire: Yeah, that’s what really drew me to them. You’ve mentioned ritual and rhythm in your process. Is there a spiritual or cultural dimension to that?

Divya: The ritual and rhythm in my practice are not merely formal concerns; they are spiritual, emotional, and cultural forms of survival and return. During a prolonged period of recovery from complex PTSD, I experienced intense migraines that lasted for months. In that time, I often found myself drawing compulsively in a dark, quiet room. This act was not a deliberate choice, but rather a necessary outlet – a way to bypass the deeply internalised conditioning I had grown up with. Through drawing, I began to take up space in a way I never had before. These drawings often depicted faces I had never seen, yet they felt hauntingly familiar, surfacing from somewhere within my subconscious.

Over time, I began to meditate more frequently and gradually emerged from the migraines. What remained was a deep connection to the gesture as a form of release and presence. My gesture-based work is rooted not only in personal lived experience but also in inherited cultural memory. Growing up in India, I was immersed in visual languages that were layered, multisensory, and complex – the vibrance of festivals, the intricate ornamentation of temples, the fine embroidery of textiles, or the richness and multiplicity found in food. There was always a sense of “too muchness,” of excess and saturation, and I see that inheritance reflected in my work through the maximalism and motifs.

Working from a state where conscious awareness is limited, something that was born out of necessity, I unlearnt the habits of overthinking, control, and perfectionism, traits deeply embedded through colonial education systems and gendered socialisation. Instead, I allow the body to lead through breath, rhythm, and the body. This surrender to process becomes ritualistic, a practice of grounding, healing, and reconnection.

The cyclical nature of my making, particularly with the self-built loom, reinforces this rhythm. The machine mirrors cycles of life, death, grief, and transformation, echoing not linear progression but return. In this sense, my process becomes more than expressive and emotive. It offers a way of returning to the self again and again, while simultaneously reaching beyond the self toward something larger and universal.

I often return to the concept of Saṃsāra, a Sanskrit word referring to the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, marked by suffering (duḥkha). My practice acknowledges pain, repetition, and impermanence, while also opening the possibility for presence, release, and transformation.

Claire: The story behind your work is very poetic. How has your upbringing in India shaped your visual language?

Divya: My upbringing in India is embedded in the emotional and material vocabulary of my work. The intensity of colour in Indian life – from saris to festivals to architectural pigments – has largely influenced my psyche. I believe my relationship to ornamentation and maximalism is tied to resisting the colonial and modernist framing of South Asian aesthetics as “decorative.” By embracing excess and intricacy, I reclaim these traditions as carriers of symbolic and emotional intelligence.

Claire: What role does gender play in your work, and how do you navigate it through abstraction or gesture?

Divya: My practice evolved from figurative psychological maps to abstract palimpsestic gestures with intricate use of colour. This shift was compulsive as much as organic when the language of line and symbol no longer sufficed. I believe that I needed a vocabulary that mirrored the complexity and fluidity of my emotional landscape. Growing up with conditioned gender biases, abstraction offers a field beyond binary understanding and representational clarity. It lets me express grief, anger, desire, and healing in ways that resist being pinned down. My gestures often respond intuitively to the space, surface, and material in front of me. There is more movement when I scale up, and the relatively smaller works appear more dense. The instinctive mark-making emerges from the body rather than the mind, moving in ways that are unplanned, reactive, and deeply felt. In that sense, they carry a kind of freedom: not the romantic idea of freedom, but a raw, urgent insistence on being uncontained. The gestures stretch, scatter, fold, dissolve, and form dense clusterings. They are in constant negotiation with their environment, almost like breathing, responding to pressure, weight, proximity, and space. Through this, the gestures become a site where the personal, the political, and the somatic entangle.

Claire: How do you know when a piece is finished, especially when working so intuitively?

Divya: In the beginning layers of the piece, there’s a lot of movement that reflects intensity and immediacy in my gestures. I feel a strong physical engagement with the work. As the layers accumulate, that movement gradually slows down. The gestures shift into shorter strokes with more rhythmic marks, as compared to the energetic long ones. Eventually, the piece reaches a point where there is almost no movement left, and my consciousness returns from the intuitive flow state. This is usually when I sense the work is nearing completion.

Claire: Can you tell us about the loom you built and how that changed your relationship with materials and process?

Divya: The loom became an integral part of my process – a way to physically embody the repetition, urgency, and flow already present in my work. Over time, what it meant to me began to shift. I was drawn to the history of Indian handloom weaving – an artform deeply rooted in autonomy, intimacy, and resistance, yet violently disrupted by colonial industrialisation. Building the loom allowed me to engage with these layered histories through the act of making. It became a space where memory, labour, and cultural inheritance converge. The continuous cyclical process of painting on the loom resonates not only with the cyclicality of returning to self but also with larger historical rhythms of erasure and resilience. In this way, working with the loom became a way of unlearning inherited constraints and returning to something more embodied, intuitive, and ancestral.

Claire: How do you balance personal narrative with broader socio-political themes in your work?

Divya: My personal experiences – particularly those of trauma and gendered conditioning – are never isolated from the cultural or political contexts that shape them. My work opens up space for others to connect, reflect, or understand through a decolonial feminist lens. I believe in working from the body outward – my own body carries layers of history, culture, gender, and memory. Through gesture and abstraction, I like to think that I contribute and invite a kind of universality, a porous field that transcends the limits of language, geography, and time itself.

Instagram: @divbalivada