Samridhi Khandelwal
About This Work
My works are connected through my interest in what the self carries across time, place, and experience. Across watercolor, oil painting, and installation, I use layered surfaces, shadows, draped forms, and white lines to explore memory, migration, pressure, and inner awareness.
In the watercolor works, Folded Light and Untitled 1, translucent washes create forms that appear, dissolve, and return. The white lines move across the surface like traces of thought, memory, or connection. In the oil paintings, Surge and Held Within, draped forms suggest the covered self. The same white lines move through the fabric with their own direction, creating tension between stillness and movement, containment and release.
Veils of Presence brings these ideas into physical space. The installation uses rice paper, charcoal, text, light, and shadow to create a layered environment. It draws from the Indian ideas of Purusha, Prakriti, and Shunya: the witnessing self, material nature, and silence. As viewers enter, their shadows fall across the rice paper and become part of the work. The installation turns looking into participation and asks the viewer to become aware of their own presence.
Together, the works move between image, body, and space. They ask what we carry, what shapes us, and what remains beneath the surface.
Artist Bio
Samridhi Khandelwal is a visual artist based in Jersey City, New Jersey. Originally from India, she holds an MFA in Painting from Coventry University, United Kingdom, and a BFA in Painting from India. She received the Finext National Award in 2018. Her practice moves across watercolor, oil painting, installation, charcoal, and works on paper. She explores how memory, migration, inherited expectations, and inner awareness shape identity over time. Her work uses reflections, shadows, draped forms, layered surfaces, and delicate lines to consider what we carry, what changes, and what remains beneath the surface. Since moving to the United States, Jersey City has become central to her practice. Her recent work reflects relocation, belonging, pressure, and transformation. She has exhibited in Jersey City, New York, India, and the United Kingdom, including JCAST, Project 14C, Art150 Gallery, Art House Productions, and Lalit Kala Akademi.
Mediums
Painting, Installation & Public Art, N/A
Film / Digital Work
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11dIb8r8OE58UhZ7_Pq2nA8ElM3Jrwgm7/view?usp=drivesdk