Creativity | Third-Space

Art that lives in the in-between.

I'm a Nepali-British, Salford-based mixed-media artist. My practice sits at the intersection of art, health, and wellbeing, shaped by my work as a therapist and my own experience of living between worlds.

I first studied art at GCSE and sixth form, then stepped away to pursue a BA in Communication, Media and Culture at Oxford Brookes, followed by a career in creative marketing. Art came back into my life during my counselling training as a self-care. Then, it became something more.

Drawing on expressive arts therapy, I use painting and mixed media to explore the things that sit just beyond language:

Identity and belonging
Migrational grief
Cultural memory
The spaces between words

Identity. Migrational grief. Cultural memory. The feelings that don't have a name in any single language.

photography by Iqra Saied

Recent Project: Sheba Arts Festival 2026

An installation exploring migration, grief, belonging, and the spaces that emerge between departure and return.

Commissioned by Sheba Arts for Sheba Arts Festival 2026, showcased at Longsight Art Space on June 2026

Artist Statement

During my MSc training, I encountered the concept of disenfranchised grief, a form of loss that is often unrecognised or unsupported. It gave language to something many migrants carry: the grief that can accompany migration.

This work draws on the Dual Process Model of grief, which suggests that we move between loss and restoration rather than progressing through grief in a linear way. Migration often embodies both experiences simultaneously. It takes much away, while also creating possibilities for renewal.

A central material within the work is the khata, a ceremonial scarf used in Nepal and adapted from Tibetan tradition. My relatives would often offer me a khata when I left Nepal after visiting. My mother once described it as an anchor and a gesture of return, something given at departure while holding hope for reunion. The khata therefore became a natural material through which to explore migration, attachment and longing.

In the installation, the white khata represents what is grieved, while the red extends outward towards restoration and possibility. Between these tensions emerges something new: what Homi K. Bhabha describes as a Third Space, a space where identity is neither entirely one thing nor another, but continually becoming. This transformation is represented through the colour blue.

The work also incorporates the voices of the Nepali diaspora. Participants were invited to share one thing they had lost and one thing they had gained through migration, alongside a colour that represented their journey. Their responses hang suspended within the installation, connected by threads in their chosen colours.

Together these voices create a collective reflection on migration as both loss and transformation.

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Past work

Taken part in a group show fundraiser for FourthWall Folkestone

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Manuscript, 15in x 38 in, Mixed Media on Paper, 2026

Made with both hands. This piece began as an exercise in bilateral movement, one of the first things I encountered in expressive arts therapy, a practice of letting the body lead before the mind can interrupt. The figure stands with her back to us, turned inward, arms folded around herself. Written into the background, woven through the marks, are words, fragments of internal monologue, the kind we rarely say aloud. The way the writing lives inside and around the body rather than beside it was intentional: this is where those words actually live. This work is meant to connote self-compassion. Self-compassion is not softness or self-indulgence, it is the quiet, ongoing work of offering yourself the same kindness you would give someone you love. Mixed media on paper

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Diurnal, 16in x 20in Mixed Media on Canvas, 2026

A daily record of arrival. Diurnal began as a journal during my first months living in Salford after moving from Kent. Each mark, each collaged fragment, each burst of yellow and green holds something from that time: the disorientation of a new city, the strange intimacy of routine forming in unfamiliar streets, the Salford City Council label embedded in the surface like a found memory. The canvas accumulates rather than resolves. There is no single moment here, only the layering of many ordinary days, pressed together until they become something else entirely. Mixed media on canvas

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Past lives, 8in x 10in, Acrylic on Canvas Board, 2026

This work explores cultural memory, language and belonging through layers of paint and fragments of Nepali text. The words appear and disappear like memories, carrying traces of place, identity and time. Inspired by my experience of living between cultures and places, the painting reflects how belonging isn't something fixed but something that continually shifts and reshapes itself. I hope it invites viewers to reflect on the places, people and histories they carry with them, and how these continue to shape who we are.

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Emergence, 24in X 32in, Acrylic on Canvas

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Manuscript, 15in x 38 in, Mixed Media on Paper, 2026

Made with both hands. This piece began as an exercise in bilateral movement, one of the first things I encountered in expressive arts therapy, a practice of letting the body lead before the mind can interrupt. The figure stands with her back to us, turned inward, arms folded around herself. Written into the background, woven through the marks, are words, fragments of internal monologue, the kind we rarely say aloud. The way the writing lives inside and around the body rather than beside it was intentional: this is where those words actually live. This work is meant to connote self-compassion. Self-compassion is not softness or self-indulgence, it is the quiet, ongoing work of offering yourself the same kindness you would give someone you love. Mixed media on paper

05

Diurnal, 16in x 20in Mixed Media on Canvas, 2026

A daily record of arrival. Diurnal began as a journal during my first months living in Salford after moving from Kent. Each mark, each collaged fragment, each burst of yellow and green holds something from that time: the disorientation of a new city, the strange intimacy of routine forming in unfamiliar streets, the Salford City Council label embedded in the surface like a found memory. The canvas accumulates rather than resolves. There is no single moment here, only the layering of many ordinary days, pressed together until they become something else entirely. Mixed media on canvas

06

Past lives, 8in x 10in, Acrylic on Canvas Board, 2026

This work explores cultural memory, language and belonging through layers of paint and fragments of Nepali text. The words appear and disappear like memories, carrying traces of place, identity and time. Inspired by my experience of living between cultures and places, the painting reflects how belonging isn't something fixed but something that continually shifts and reshapes itself. I hope it invites viewers to reflect on the places, people and histories they carry with them, and how these continue to shape who we are.

Work with me

An installation exploring migration, grief, belonging, and the spaces that emerge between departure and return.

Past work

If my work resonates with something you're trying to say, I'd love to hear from you.