Artists statement

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran is a contemporary artist of Sri Lankan, Tamil heritage. His practice traverses global histories and languages of figuration with a particular focus on South Asian traditions. He sees the imaginative exploration of ancient pasts as a way to speculate on parallel futures and to expand ways of perceiving the present. While he works across ceramics, bronze casting, painting, drawing, and immersive installation, he is best known for his hybrid ceramic sculptures that fuse references to ancient forms with various tropes and imagery from popular culture, zoology and other discourses. Through these works he explores themes of secular and non-secular idolatry, co-existent belief systems, queer aesthetics, disciplinary and regional histories of ceramics and sculpture, monumentality, as well as self-portraiture and autobiography.