In this exhibition, local artist Par Nair presents paintings and embroidered artworks inspired by the garden outside her family home in the region of Kerala in India. For many years, Nair’s mother has tended the garden, nurtured its growth, and savoured the fruit it bears with her family. Her mother and grandmother continue to enjoy the garden and the view it provides each day from their windows. In part, Nair views this enclosed domestic space as a symbol of the expectations and limitations placed on the women in her life. At the same time, she captures its beauty and vitality, allowing the edges of her painting to appear loose and soft as if the garden itself might shift or float away. While grappling with her experience of prescribed gender roles, Nair uses her paintings and hand-embroidered works to experiment with freedom and malleability, describing a place from her grandmother’s imagination that “centres nothing but dreaming.”

Lush with mature trees and foliage, Nair’s garden is suffused with light. The paintings’ rosy hues are drawn from the vibrant palettes of Malayali homes, which hum in harmony with the warmth of the sun. Among the paintings are a pair of poetic love letters embroidered on traditional garments called mundus and an installation of 200 embroidered mango leaves in shades of green and brown. Reenacting the rhythms of traditional craft and gardening, these meditative works reflect on the push and pull between the artist’s two homes and pay homage to feminized labour of the near and distant past. Derived from photographs and memories, the place from my grandma’s dreams is an immersive exhibition that transports viewers and the artist to a place of abundance that is at once real and imagined. Actualized through a lens of hope and reminiscence, it is a dream made real.

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.

The RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program is generously sponsored by the RBC Foundation.