STATEMENT OF WORK

Rujuta Rao's multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, book art and sound art, alongside a parallel practice of conceptual and functional garments. Her practice is at once research-led and intensely personal, investigating the fragility and limitations of various everyday and specialized materials alongside themes and topics that she returns to cyclically; such as the adaptibility of mangroves, family history, and hospitality. Since the beginning of her career, much of Rao’s work has been mobile, initially a response to tense and violent conditions she encountered as one of very few female students in the sculpture department at Baroda, and later as a reflection of her own transience and resourcefulness; these conditions have also informed the unstable fixity and the intimate–often handheld–scale of her work. The interplay of Rao’s presence and absence is critical to the human address of her installations and objects, which seek to build a direct connection between artist and viewer. Her studio practice has been enriched by prestigious residencies globally, lending to a body of work that is largely site-specific or assembled for exhibition. 

In habitually returning to subjects and materials over time, Rao challenges a linear and singular reading of her expansive artistic practice, and of our understanding of focus. While largely conceptual and abstract, her work addresses foundational questions of human existence, including of the nature of relationships, the edges of truth and fiction, and the fragmenting after-effects of trauma.