Chila Kumari Burman

Other than William Morris, Chila Kumari Burman is another very influential artist for me.

Chila is also a British artist but her work explores the representation of females, specifically South Asian, through history as well as her identity. She looks at and gains inspiration from different categories of women, such as from politics, fashion, Bollywood and the people in her everyday life(family), and collages what she explores into her artwork. She uses a mixture of printing techniques and photography to create her work. Her art is her way of documenting the different things she learns and explores about both herself and the women she looks at. She uses a lot of self portraits in her work. I think its her own way of showing what she thinks of her self and finding belonging. The work she tends to create happen to be vibrant and eye catching, which is influenced by her culture. 

“These self-portraits position the construction of racial and sexual identity as a process that is crafted and fluid within the process of representation. My manipulation of the photographic image questions the idea of the photograph as a document of the empirical reality to reveal ‘an image of myself’… My work is about a continual exploration of my dual cultural identity and the construction of identities other than my own…” (Chila Kumari Burman quoted in Lynda Nead’s monograph on the artist, ‘Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures’, Kala Press, London 1995)

For me, this is the most influential piece out of her works. She has collaged together very vibrant and colourful images of women from different social, professional and stereotypical groups in a larger portrait of her self. I believe she is communicating to us that even though she is brought up in a western culture,the still has another part of her. Each image she has used is like a piece in a puzzle.She is trying to explore who she is. I like how she uses the photograph of her western self as the larger image to which the smaller images lay in. The blank spaces, in my opinion show that she is still finding the pieces to the puzzle or finding who she is. Overall, I really like her work as its more art on whats she learnt (documentation) rather than the questions still unanswered. 

References: 

Chila Kumari Burman.(2015).Chila Kumari Burman.[Online].[Accessed: 15 February 2018]. Available: http://www.chila-kumari-burman.co.uk/index2.htm

BBC.(2008).Artist Chila Kumari Burman.[Online].[Accessed: 15 February 2018]. Available: http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/content/articles/2008/04/30/north_west_chila_burman_s13_w10_feature.shtml