A SOLO EXHIBITION BY PRIYANKA AELAY

10 SEPT - 01 OCT

The forest occupies a central position in Priyanka Aelay’s new body of work. Her paintings present it not simply as a landscape, but as a complex environment in which different forms of life coexist. Animals appear within dense vegetation—sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs or groups—while distinctions between terrestrial, aquatic and aerial worlds become deliberately fluid. A fox may inhabit the same visual space as a tiger, while foliage can shift into coral and water can assume the qualities of sky. These transformations allow Aelay to consider the forest as both a physical environment and an imaginative space.

Working in fine layers of acrylic on linen, Aelay constructs landscapes that move between observation and invention. Her approach is informed by her academic research in film studies and visual culture, particularly her engagement with folklore, myth and popular storytelling, in which the forest functions as a site of uncertainty, transformation and trial.

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Aelay’s landscapes resist clear boundaries. Vegetation, water, sky and animal life intersect and transform into one another, suggesting an interconnected ecology rather than separate habitats. The animals can be read both literally and symbolically, allowing questions of belonging, solitude, companionship and coexistence to emerge through the landscape itself.

Her treatment of colour and botanical detail reflects her long-standing interest in the miniature painting tradition, particularly its highly constructed environments and sophisticated use of colour. Rather than reproducing that tradition, she draws from its visual strategies, developing a contemporary pictorial language in which scale, transparency, pattern and spatial ambiguity become important structural devices.

It Will Rain Again When We Meet brings together these concerns around landscape, folklore, memory and interconnectedness. Aelay’s forests occupy a space between the observed world and the worlds produced by stories, offering fragments, encounters and visual clues through which viewers can construct their own readings.

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