Usha Kar – Oxfordshire Artweeks

366 Usha Kar

Region: Oxford Centre

Artform: Painting

“I was born on a rainy July day onto a pink candlewick bedspread in a rented flat in London. Shortly after, my distant grandmother asked my parents to send me to her, in India, so she could raise me herself. Instead, I grew up in the margins of London…..Occasionally I wondered, how would my life have been, if my mother had put her baby on a boat, to travel to India?…..…”

During Artweeks I am exhibiting “Fragments from my Other Life” a series of paintings exploring, through imagination, layered memories and magical realism, the juxtaposition of a life lived and a life imagined, through the eyes of a child.

Balancing precision with gestural flow, my work creates animistic, mythic spaces where beauty and unease coexist, and where questions of identity, belonging, resilience and justice extend beyond the human world. Darkness becomes a site of solace and strength, and my practice explores charged psychological terrains where presence is implied and absence becomes an emotional force, revealing fragile structures that shape human experience.

Getting here:

Walking and cycling – Kendrew Barn is located on St Giles, directly across the road from the War Memorial in front of St Giles Church (note, NOT the Martyrs memorial). The venue is set back a little from the road and you enter through a worked iron gate.

Paid parking available on St Giles

Any bus from Summertown or Woodstock Road to city centre.

What three words: vibrate,sounds,insert

Artist is present at the venue