Divya Sharma
Shape of Identity
Divya Sharma’s Shape of Identity is an early work that begins to set out themes she continues to develop in her practice, while still functioning as a resolved piece in its own right. Created for the exhibition Home Ground Helps in Karachi, Pakistan, the tufted tapestry engages directly with borders, belonging, and the unstable conditions through which identity is formed.
The surface is built from layered blues that shift between dense and open fields. From a distance, it recalls cartographic views of divided land and unstable shorelines. Up close, the tufted surface reads as terrain, rising and falling like physical ground. Mapping is not represented but made material, turning abstract borders into something that can be felt.
Divya Sharma Shape of Identity (2022), acrylic yarn tufted on hemp, 300 x 120 cm
“For me, thinking is making. My ideas emerge through process. Some people sketch. I wind thread and ideas start forming.”
– Divya Sharma
Blue operates as a structural contradiction. It suggests containment through mapped waters, edges, and systems of division, while also resisting definition through its associations with sky and sea. The work holds this tension without resolution, framing borders as imposed systems placed onto something fundamentally fluid.
These tensions extend into questions of collective memory, ancestry, and the constructed narratives that shape diasporic identity. Rather than being illustrated, they are embedded in the work’s structure, where identity emerges through fragments of memory, culture, and displacement. Home is not fixed to a single place but formed across overlapping geographies and unstable points of return.
In Sharma’s practice, weaving and tufting function as methods of building meaning through labour, repetition, and layering. Place-making becomes an ongoing process in which history is continuously reworked rather than settled.
Shape of Identity resists closure, instead asking what identity becomes when it is continuously formed through material, memory, and perception, and what remains when no single origin can hold it together.
“My work reflects on my journey as an immigrant, splicing together autobiographical and fictional narratives that re-imagine what it means to belong. Faced with histories that have been silenced by imperial regimes, I use my work to envisage new stories.”
– Divya Sharma
About the Artist
Divya Sharma is a London-based Indian-British multidisciplinary artist and alumna of the Royal College of Art (MA Sculpture) and the University of the Arts London (BA Painting). Working across textiles, thread, video, and site-specific installation, her practice focuses on place-making through labour-intensive processes.
Raised in India in a home where fabric functioned as both material and language, her relationship to textiles is shaped by lived experience and her mother’s fabric sculptures. Drawing on myth, memory, and the cultural landscape of Tamil, she uses tufting and tapestry to explore fragmented histories, imagined geographies, and displaced narratives. Through material density and scale, she constructs environments where memory, body, and perception intersect.
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