Anupama S Iyer

The juxtaposition of a South Indian Temple with the signature terraced housing of London, on the High Street of East Ham. 

The muted Gopuram in yellows, reds and greys, echoing colours of its neighbouring structures instead of the usual vibrant blues, pinks and greens. 

It felt like being in a transitory space, moving between geography and cultures, between deeply familiar and completely foreign territories. This incoherence between what I saw on site and what I remembered from my lived experiences, piqued my interest and led me to study the architectural details of the site. The visual collection of architectural details like the ornaments and brick works, opened doors to playing and creating new, hybrid forms - a visual amalgamation of culture, heritage and memories. 

Design historian, Alice Twemblow notes how some contemporary designers use ornaments as a portal to cut across the real urban present, going into the past or perhaps an imaginary world. Reflecting on the concept of escapism and my interest in surrealism and world-building, with this film The Island Between, I imagine an island where the built environment bridges the East and the West, creating a new hybrid world. Reassembling the elements of architecture, this stop-motion animation explores the possibilities of how the built environment could look in such a world.

Thinking through making, playing, reassembling and translating the elements of East Ham architecture into modular clay tiles, I aim to bridge East and West, art and craft, hand-made and industrial and interior and exterior to make space for a cross-cultural dialogue. 

Combining forms from my visual research in East Ham, London and colours from my memories and lived experiences in India, I developed The Island Between Pattern Collection.

Identifying the peacock motif on the wall of the temple in East Ham as the same as that on my mother’s saree, I started studying the relationship between architecture and textiles. Upon research, I discovered that not only are the motifs and patterns shared across architecture and textiles but also that, textiles often function as an extension of architecture itself. The motifs and patterns often drawn from nature and the local environment of the artisans, are spread across not only the exteriors of the built environment as ornaments and textiles but also brought into the interior spaces in the form of tiles, ceramic objects, upholstery and wearable fabrics. Carrying this tradition forward, through The Island Between Pattern Collection, bridging the gap between art and craft, industry and hand-made, I aim to deepen the bond between people and places. 

In 2022, as a recipient of the Gordon Peter Pickard Drawing Prize at the Royal College of Art, I traveled to Chennai from London to explore how the markets in my home town were different in comparison with markets set up by South Asian migrant communities in London.

With the methods of documentary photography, on-site drawings and conversations with locals, Bustling Bazaar is non- linear collage of the market scene in Chennai, India.