"WITH ONE VOICE" SERIES
With One Voice is the continuation of my Beautiful Voice series, which pays tribute to the silent strength, resilience, and sacred connection shared by women across generations. Through mixed-media collage on wood panels, I layer handmade and decorative papers from Japan, India, and other regions with paint, creating textured surfaces that carry memory, cultural presence, and lived experience.
Rooted in my experience as an African-born South Asian woman and former refugee, these works draw on a deep well of inherited strength and intergenerational memory. They reflect resilience passed down not only through words, but through gestures, touch, care, and presence. The figures lean toward one another, creating spaces of trust, belonging, and mutual recognition. In recent works, I have become increasingly interested in how emotional connection is expressed through proximity and relationship, and in the human desire to feel seen, understood, and held by others.
The language of collage itself plays an important role in this exploration. Papers overlap, dissolve, and migrate across figures, softening boundaries between body, garment, and space. Many fragments are carried forward from one work to another, forming a quiet material archive that connects the paintings across time. In this way, paper functions as more than a surface. It becomes a carrier of memory, migration, and cultural inheritance. Layered skin tones and patterned surfaces reflect the complexity of women's identities, while the interplay of paint, paper, light, and colour creates a tactile intimacy that invites viewers into the emotional life of the work.
The women in these paintings do not speak loudly, but they resonate with quiet force. Their power lives not in dominance or declaration, but in presence, tenderness, and connection. With One Voice reflects a shared rhythm shaped by memory, migration, care, and intertwined lives. In their closeness, arms linked, bodies leaning, and eyes gently closed, resilience becomes collective rather than individual. These works offer space for recognition, healing, and the possibility that belonging is found not only in ourselves but in one another.
