During her residency, Par Nair has experimented with new styles and techniques to create a series of textile works and landscape paintings inspired by her family’s home in Kerela, India. Lush with greenery and radiating warmth, Nair’s landscape paintings represent a new direction for the artist whose works have typically featured figures indoors. Alongside the paintings, Nair also presents embroidery projects that are meditative and poetic, drawing on themes of migration, inheritance, and family history.

Par Nair (she/her) is an Indian born artist and educator who lives and makes in the GTA. Par’s art practice pays tribute to ancestral and cultural roots, while intimately and speculatively reimagining diasporic futures through oil paintings, hand embroidery, installation, and creative writing. Par earned her Master’s in Interdisciplinary Arts from OCAD University and has shown her works nationally and internationally. Notable showings include Art Museum at University of Toronto, Craft Ontario, The Textile Museum of Canada, Nuit Blanche, The maritime Museum for the Atlantic, Rajiv Menon Contemporary (LA) and The Kochi Biennale (India). Par currently holds the position of Sessional Faculty at OCAD University, where she teaches painting and art theory.