Rupa Shankar ( She, Her )

My work begins with kolam — ritual drawings made at South Indian thresholds each morning, built through repetition, then erased by wind and footsteps. That daily cycle of making and releasing is not loss. It is a practice of renewal: you show up, you begin again.

In 2024 I left a twenty-year career in corporate design to commit fully to my studio practice. That transition was its own kind of kolam — a deliberate erasure in order to start fresh.

The logic I draw from is not kolam's imagery but its method: repeated units of form, accumulated until the whole becomes something larger than its parts. In my paintings this happens through layered color and continuous line. In my ceramics it happens literally — petal pressed to petal, coil built on coil, the hand returning to the same gesture until a form emerges. The process is the point. Structure and rhythm, made visible through time and attention.

Color is the other language running through this work. Growing up in Mumbai — where my mother's saris were a daily education in what color could carry — it was never decorative. It was meaning itself: devotional, communal, historically coded. That inheritance moved with me. In my paintings, color accumulates the way form does in my ceramics: each layer added slowly, in relationship to what came before, until the whole holds a particular weight. A sense of calm. Of having arrived somewhere.

The yoga sutras offer a framework I return to: sa tu dirgha kala nairantarya — practice takes hold only through long, uninterrupted, devoted attention. I left my design career with that in mind. There is urgency in the decision, a sense that time is not unlimited — but the work itself asks for the opposite of urgency. Each mark, each pressed petal, each layer of color slows things down. Repetition is where the urgency and the stillness meet.

I have lived this logic too. Across seven cities on two continents — each move a kind of erasure, each one a beginning. I came to the United States just before September 11th, the first woman in my family to cross those distances, and I have been crossing them ever since: geographies, careers, languages of making. I have learned to trust this too: tomorrow's drawing is made possible by erasing today's.

Rupa Shankar is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans large-scale geometric paintings, sculptural ceramics, and functional objects that bridge art and everyday ritual. With an MFA from Boston University and over 20 years in design leadership, she brings a sharp eye for interaction and form to her studio practice. Born in Mumbai, India and based in Jersey City, NJ, Rupa draws deeply from the visual traditions of her heritage—particularly the ritual geometry of kolam—to develop a contemporary visual language rooted in repetition, symmetry, and sacred space. As a certified yoga teacher, her work is informed by contemplative practices, yoga philosophy, and a lifelong inquiry into how we connect with objects through presence, ritual, and meaning.At the heart of her practice is a desire to create art that fosters presence and participation. Whether through vibrant, architectonic canvases or ceramics designed to be held, Rupa’s work engages viewers in an embodied relationship. Color, texture, geometry, and scale become tools for reorienting the senses—grounding us in the here and now while connecting us to broader cultural narratives.Living in Jersey City, she finds resonance between the ephemeral rituals of her heritage and the city’s rapidly shifting urban landscape—both constantly redrawn through collective presence and renewal.