Mitakshara Chaudhary

Endings, Beginnings
The relationship between physical reality and subjective perception of past, present and the future.

Mitakshara (1998) is an architect and a designer from Jammu & Kashmir, India currently based in London. An emerging ceramic and glass artist currently focusing on the amalgamation and transposition of art and architecture. She completed her BArch (2016-2021) from Balwant Sheth School of Architecture, NMIMS in India and moved to London in 2022 to pursue her Master’s degree in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art.

She has collaborated with her peers to create live scale installations, the most recent being ‘The Unity Pavilion- “YOUnited” for the 2020 Kala Ghoda Art Festival in Mumbai, India. Alongside this, she was part of six documentation publications during her undergraduate degree.

Her most recent work was showcased at ‘Monophony’ (2023), a collaboration between the Royal College of Art and the Royal College of Music.

With the idea of imagining and experimenting with materiality and its ability to be within or outside infinite space, she wants to learn how a drawing would draw you. How a space would or could be perceived as. To being able to navigate the unknown.

My work in individual pieces before installing them together

Looking outside the digital realm of architecture, the physicality of materials is what Mitakshara finds most valuable. Her idea is to create and design work which might alter the perceiver’s perception where they don’t have to look at things as a whole – just ‘the fragments of it’ being there would be enough.If a space is formed by predefined knowledge in art and architecture, the experience of that space tends to be the same, familiar and maybe even less new. The left out fragments would be the memory and the mystery to which one wants to draw attention to, where the endings and beginnings of the element is enough to determine the space.

Her current practice focuses on the space left behind and lived through memories, the free-form movement towards infinite space, the space between tangible and intangible, what they can disclose and the story of a changed relationship to the language of endings and beginnings. With the embracement of infinite space, elongating the ways of seeing, she began to confront the moments of lucidity, what defines an object, the bare minimum required to experience the spatial dynamics.

Is it the qualitative space, the ambiguity of a material, the action we do through it or want to do through it? Towards the concentration on spatial distortions, it is an attempt to reshape her practice in spaces we didn’t know existed.

To gain perspective of the unknown through the materiality of spaces, and to ‘Never take the obvious for granted’, she encourages herself to think about the relationship between physical reality and subjective perception of past, present and the future slowly moving towards what we PERCEIVE, CONCEIVE AND LIVE today.