Evidence of
The Nervous
System
Breach
The first slash. The canvas was grey and the red refused to stay contained. Every mark is a record of resistance — the scratching, the stippling, the vertical drag. This is what a breakdown looks like when it decides to become architecture.
Eruption
No structure survives this one. Pink and crimson and teal and violet collide at the centre and pull outward. The palette knife moved faster than the intention.
Crowd
The city as a nervous system. Faces overlapping, bodies dissolving into colour fields — cyan, ochre, pink. Every figure is mid-sentence. The painting refuses to give any one of them priority.
The Transmission
Two figures on a burning ground. Between them: something red, something being passed or extracted. You take something from everyone you touch.
The Herd Within
Figures and animals — inseparable. The human and the bovine folded together in warm reds and golds. The crowd has no clear edges. Everyone is inside someone else's body here.
Shelter
They carry umbrellas against a sky the colour of a wound. A mushroom grows at the feet of the smallest figure. The shelters don't help. The rain is interior.
The Run
Purple horses under a red sun. Nothing is chasing them — the running is the point. Speed as a way of feeling alive without needing a reason.
"The canvas is the only place where the noise makes sense."
— Maanya Patel, Studio Notes 2024
The
Procedure
A figure is laid out on a medical table at the vanishing point of the image. Flames — or perhaps crowds — line both sides of the perspective. A dark horned figure presides at the far end.
The room is both operating theatre and theatre-theatre. The patient is very still. The audience is on fire.
Cell Study (Gold)
Acrylic, impasto on board · Up close: organisms. Cellular. The canvas held in the hand like evidence.
Poured (Pair)
Fluid acrylic on board · diptych · Two surfaces that caught the same moment of pouring. The fluid remembers its movement even after it dries.
Additional small works available on request
(Blood Memory)
The body as a container. A fishbowl as a skull. Red paint bleeds down the inside of the glass — the mind staining its own walls. Salt accumulates at the base like what the body processes but cannot expel. Broken glass suspended mid-cavity: memory as shrapnel.
The red organ at the centre is neither lung nor heart nor brain. It is all of them.
On the Altar
The same organ, removed from its vessel. Displayed. Examined. The salt is a preservative and a wound. What is placed on a plate to be looked at can no longer look back.
"I didn't set out to make a sculpture about grief. But grief is what made it. The fishbowl came first. Then the organ. Then I understood what I was doing."
The Meridian series comprises two related works: the contained vessel (S.01) and the extracted organ (S.01b), intended to be exhibited together.
The body pinned in place — flesh-pink, malformed and irregular, the safety pin running through it like a clinical intervention. Three photographs, three ways of holding it. The safety pin is the thing that was supposed to keep something together.
(Without Witness)
A torso sculpted headless. What the body looks like when the mind is removed from the record. The blooms at the neck are not flowers — they are what thought looks like when it has nowhere to go.
Garden
Pink intestinal coils suspended from a red thread. The gut — second brain, site of instinct and fear — made visible and displayed like a chandelier. Beauty and revulsion occupying the same form.
"The texture is the record of the resistance."
— Maanya Patel, Studio Notes 2024
"I don't paint things. I paint the vibration of things. If you can see the bone, you're looking at the wrong part. Look at the space between the joint where the ache lives."
"The grid is a lie we tell ourselves to feel safe. I use the grid only to show you how easily it breaks. Basquiat knew this. The lines are cages. Break the cage."