Tulika Ladsariya

ARTIST STATEMENT
As a migrant, I question what we carry with us and what gets left behind, to better understand how legacies are passed through memories, stories and intangible experiences of living between cultures. My interdisciplinary practice focuses on domestic objects in the feminine sphere, where handwork and gardening labor become totems of the small everyday rituals that ground, smooth over, and center women’s lives. I often involve my mother and daughter as participants to create familial collaborations through generations. With clay, I build stoneware vessels, embossed with crochet and tatting lace made by my mother using traditional hand gestures of kneading, rolling, folding to hold precious memories from my homeland. I multiply plant lives in propagation vessels which correspond to the flesh-ness of the womb.
Pointing to an act of rising above one’s identity while acknowledging its power, my compulsion to nurture and to share the process of nurturance is a commitment to extending compassion to those, who like me, have had to lose parts of themselves to find their being outside the double bind of cultural expectation and assimilation.

BIO
Trained in painting, Tulika Ladsariya often works with acrylics, and is frequently drawn to objects associated with traditional women’s work using domesticity and nurture to discuss fragility, beauty, femininity, identity, and personal history. Born in Mumbai, India and living in Chicago, USA for the past decade, her work is an exploration of her layered identity – as an Indian-born woman, a first-generation immigrant, and a mother.
Ladsariya is a qualified Chartered Accountant and her artistic practice has largely been self-driven, supported by workshops in art centers and residency programs. She transitioned to a creative full-time studio practice after her stint working for an auction house. She serves in the arts community through Artist/ Mother groups, as a board member for cultural organizations, and works in the arts administration and teaching fields on a contractual basis. She worked on the streetscape design project for Devon Ave (Little India in Chicago) and is one of the artists for the Spaceshift collective for a community art-space in the neighborhood.
She has exhibited at the Hammond Museum NY, Ralph Arnold Gallery- Loyola University, Hyde Park Art Center, Woman-made Gallery, Expo Chicago, Riverside Arts Center, Jamaat Art gallery Mumbai and Art Heritage Gallery New Delhi.
She has been a resident at the Hyde Park Art Center from 2019-2021. She is a recipient of the BOLT residency with Chicago Artists Coalition for 2022-23. She is a 2022-23 recipient of the In-Session Fellowship for Threewalls Foundation.

Web: tulika.art
IG: @tulikaartist