India Dewar

The distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms and the value judgments associated with these classifications is something that India investigates through her work, by making art that encompasses techniques, references and effects which blend so called, ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’ to the extent that that the binary divisions begin to collapse. An associated thread of interest is souvenir collecting and the light it sheds on our self-construction of identity – our tacit employment of cultural objects as indices of meaning and in order to build a personal history.

India has recently have been painting waves and bodies of water, concerned with the voyages being made by migrant populations to Europe. Flood, stream, flow and influx are words that we hear all too often in relation to this subject. India explores the qualities and impacts of metaphor and the way that deeply embedded figures of speech can structure our patterns of thought. Her recent work has tried to make sense of this strange and troubling convergence of migrant and tourist in many Mediterranean ports, using objects and materials associated with the tourist experience in a form that gestures towards the home and domesticity.