I am an architect and an artist, willing to learn new things every day, my surroundings, the space, its extensions, objects, the people, associations and our bodily experiences. As a practise, I started exploring and learning relations between the constructs/architecture of our minds (the inner-worldly spatialities) - like the dreamscapes, daydreams, emotions, and our feelings influence the real world lived spaces (the outer worldly spatialities) - like the spaces and the media that we consume.
I am Shreya Mehta, a graduate from the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA), Mumbai. Living in the constant, conflicting spatiality of my house, my desire for an in-between, and the abstract idea of space stem from it. Living between my projected self and my true inner self, my outward reality and my internal emotions and moods, the real space, and a virtual dream-scape, liminal, fictitious and imagined spaces became my escape and liberation. My practise involves turning the everyday/mundane spatialities, dreams, objects, associations, memories, and bodily experiences into landscapes of emotions, visualising the struggles of suppressed feelings and unspoken words through and in space. The main aim is to capture and understand these fictitious and virtual spatialities of our deep subconscious, analysing them and producing critical works deeply rooted in the everyday lived stories and landscapes of the modern world, while exploring and discovering newer ways of representing and drawing.
I seek to move away from the conventional way of thinking and representing, finding a more expressive, experimental way of perceiving this uncanny, liminal, and Kafkaesque. I aim to create outputs that bring out a sensorial, experiential and open-ended landscape. This way, the drawings and outputs remain more raw, authentic and personal with a universal lens, revealing the true, pure and deepest hidden desires. As a designer, I believe that our designs should be sensorial, authentic, experiential, problem-solving, and functional. A spatial idea should be a thought-provoking one, beyond conventional ways of thinking and living. I feel a space should be an apparatus that serves on a personal level with the user, yet also caters to and opens to and for the public or a larger group of people in a way. Designing a space includes feelings, emotions, and also observing the detailed/intricate elements that it brings with it. Architecture or spatial design should operate as a tool or an answer to slow things down, give time a pause in terms of space, and from everyday chaos, and bring calm and cater to the mind and body. |