About

Asha Uberoi is a multi-media artist working predominantly with ceramics, oil paint, and textiles, currently living and working in the Southwest of England. Fascinated by the cultural coding of historic artefacts, she crafts characterised recreations of ancient figures and motifs, taking them out of the traditional museum and into reimagined worlds. Starting each work with observational sketching, she delves into various museum collections - from the British Museum in London to the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest - immersing herself in the ancient shapes, colours, and marks left by time. Each sketch serves as a bridge between histories - often separated by glass boxes and thick walls - allowing physically distant forms of knowledge to intersect. From this, sculptures and paintings form, at which point these muddled worlds are brought to life. With some outcomes being more direct articulations of one or more artefacts represented in single forms, others are so far characterised that they become hard to situate chronologically. An example of the latter is her series Speckled Man (2024).

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She approaches artefacts with creative eyes and ears, with no intention to embody a refined historic knowledge, instead searching deep for the signs of human interaction and listening as histories natter between museum walls; what tales do these objects have to tell beyond the museum's academic evaluations? Looking to the written work of art historian James Elkins, where he notes that ‘...seeing is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immensely troubled...and caught up in the threads of the unconscious.’ (Elkins, 1997, p. 11), Asha is continually growing an understanding for the irrationality in both her way of seeing, and the museum's evaluations of artefacts. Acknowledging this throughout her playful material enquiries, she hope to capture more than the outcome of looking, but experiencing the lively nature of artefacts by capturing their intrinsic agency.