It was a selfie of sorts with brushes and strokes. Shivani Sunu’s self-painting has her standing in front of her home. It is intimate yet sombre — the fading light of the day accentuating shadows— illustrating memories past.
“It was all inspired by Shirley Jackson’s book The Haunting of Hill House,” says Shivani. “While reading it, I found myself thinking about how a house can be alive, not literally, but emotionally,” she notes.
Her takeaway from the book is abundantly spread out in her work, displayed at the recently concluded degree show of the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram. The house is not mere background. “It shows how the spaces we live in become part of who we are,” Shivani says.
Shivani’s work reflects the mood at the annual degree show. Intimate and personal, with a surge of energy that fills the campus with installations, paintings, and experiments that portrayed the spirit of a graduating class ready to step into the wider world. There was a pulse of transformation as well, an instinct balanced with discipline, and tonnes of memories reshaped into meaning in every bit of the work on show.
Among the works, one interesting piece is an installation where letters form the shape of sparrows waiting in line.
Titled ‘Gabriel’, in the work Alroy Biju has drawn ideas from his mental sketches from childhood and evolved them into a functional typographic system. Displayed on folded panels, the black illustrations blended seamlessly into letters and numbers, bridging the organic with the symbolic.
“I was inspired by my brother’s long-legged sparrow drawings. They were arranged to form alphabets, with curves out of wings, and punctuation out of beaks. It started as an instinct and later grew into a disciplined visual language, reminding viewers that design is not merely about aesthetics but about transformation,” says Alroy.
The show also held space for an intensity of a different kind, one that pulled many towards ‘Love Lust Liver’, a work by Kavya M. It began not as art but as documentation, a way to mark words that once felt impossible to process, she says. “In a moment of urgency, I carved them into my body, as a record of emotion. What began as a private mark of struggle became a memory transformed into art. Once I moved on emotionally, I could see the beauty and intensity of it,” she reflects, showing how words can shift from pain to poetry.
Such reshaped individual experiences did turn heads at the exhibition, but some works showing a collective spirit of experimentation left a deeper, enriched inkling.
One such perspective was ‘Thengappura’ by Sandeep S An installation made from coconut shells, wood, and roof tiles. “The work recreates a traditional hut while drawing attention to Kerala’s deep-rooted relationship with coconut. The structure evokes themes of sustenance, memory, ecology, and rural life,” says Sandeep.
Experimentation was also the hallmark of the art display of Vishnu Dev, whose series titled ‘Memories’ blended printing and photography. Using the simple setup of a lens, a cardboard box and X-ray, he experimented with Cyanotype to capture memories.
These works offer a glimpse into the subconscious of the young artists.
This article is written by Sreeshanth N S and Keerthana C for TNIE.