The forest in all its richness and diversity takes vital importance in Priyanka Aelay’s paintings. The lush terrain is visible in vast expanses, revealing the presence of fauna amidst the vegetation – a fox here, a tiger there, a jewel-like bird peeping from within the multihued foliage. The delicacy and scale of these creatures emphasises the larger-than-life quality of their surroundings, building on an atmosphere of abundance and growth. Working with fine layers of acrylic pigments on linen canvas, she creates landscapes that bring together the real and imaginary, the tangible and intangible.

The current series of work reflects Priyanka’s deep engagement with her academic research in film studies and visual culture, and extends her exploration of popular folklore and myth that often locate entire narratives within the jungle. The subject matter, with respect to its literary context, poetry and theatricality impacted her understanding and translation of visual storytelling in subtle ways. Some of the tales she studied, including the widely dramatized ‘Baalanagamma’, are characterised by the protagonists’ trials and tribulations within challenging circumstances in the wild, unknowing of the almanac and dependent on the rhythms of nature to calculate the passing of time. This also influenced the development of a series of largescale works in circular format, recalling moon-cycles that are both a feminine reference as well as compositional devices that break the hierarchy of directional viewing and normalised segregations of aquatic, terrestrial, and aerial environments.

...While figuration in the social context played a role in her earlier work, landscape has been a mainstay in her visual vocabulary. Her imagery resonates with the sophisticated colour palettes and botanical brilliance that exists in the miniature painting tradition, something she has always been drawn toward. Through her art she creates portals into new realities, with a delicate balance of stylised linear configurations and luminous painted spaces, where tethered and free-floating organic forms appear to move and breathe. One of Priyanka’s aesthetic abilities is to play with sensory perceptions by juxtaposing colours and utilising transparency and opacity of pigment, creating the foundation for gentle transitions of mood; light and dark, day and night, waking and sleeping.

While celebrating essences of folklore and natural life in its myriad representations and imaginations, Priyanka leaves space for the viewers varied interpretations, leaving clues and windows to ideas in elusive details spread across the picture plane. She constructs magical worlds that quietly subsume and embrace the life forms that live within it.

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