Exhibitions
Arati Reddy-Devlin: Micro-Worlds and the Art of Layered Vision
By Despina Tunberg, Curator, World Wide Art Books and Artavita
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There are artists who move through disciplines, and there are artists who synthesize them. Arati Reddy-Devlin belongs firmly in the second category. A UK-trained graphic designer, fine art printmaker and qualified art and design teacher, Reddy-Devlin has built a practice whose roots reach back through four decades of formal training, beginning at the London College of Communication, continuing through postgraduate printmaking at Brighton University, a British Council Scholarship to Ljubljana Art Academy, and culminating in a PGCE at Goldsmiths. That accumulation of technical discipline is visible in every work she makes — not as constraint but as a kind of earned freedom, the freedom of someone who has genuinely mastered her tools.
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A pivotal period in her career came unexpectedly whilst living on a small island off Dubrovnik, Croatia — a stepping off the treadmill of city life. The ever-shifting light on the sea, storms approaching from the mainland, cicadas in the summer heat, and the abundant natural forms around her hillside home became the inspiration for her collection of pen and black ink line drawings, which have since become an integral part of the schema of her work. There is something almost meditative about this origin story: the trained professional slowing down, sharpening her attention, and finding that the micro-world had been waiting for her all along.
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The Croatian pen and ink works are the clearest distillation of her printmaker's sensibility. As a trained printmaker, Reddy-Devlin works backwards in her pictures, seeing images as layers of shapes, textures, colors and patterns. Her ink drawing landscapes often start as line drawings that force a high degree of selectivity in the choice of shapes, frequently beginning from the bottom of the page to create distinct positive and negative forms — a process that encourages seeing the micro rather than the macro. Works such as Luka, Olive Grove, Ina's Terrace and From the Hill demonstrate this beautifully: they are images of extraordinary patience, where a single olive branch or a roofline becomes a world unto itself, every contour considered, every void as deliberate as any mark.
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The gouache works — Rooftops, Seaview, Dubrovnik Playground, Singing Blue Tree — introduce color into this rigorously constructed visual language. Here, Reddy-Devlin's graphic design training becomes explicit: her color sense is bold and tightly controlled, organized around strong chromatic relationships rather than atmospheric suggestion. These are not impressionistic landscapes; they are graphic propositions, images where color and form argue with and support each other in equal measure.
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Her most recent and perhaps most ambitious series marks a decisive evolution. This current body of work fuses her passion for science fiction, robotics and mechanical parts with Medieval Art, interwoven with intricate natural forms to create further micro-worlds — work that is intricate, time-consuming and filled with a multitude of hues and layers of patterning that all require close inspection. The titled work Predator Drones announces this new direction with striking confidence: the collision of natural intricacy with the language of military technology creates a
productive and unsettling tension, asking the viewer to consider where beauty resides and what it might be complicit in. It is the work of an artist expanding her practice rather than repeating it.
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Reddy-Devlin has exhibited internationally across the UK, Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Hong Kong and the USA, and her work has been featured in Aesthetica Magazine and Contemporary Art Curator Magazine. She is an affiliate artist with the Circle Foundation for the Arts, and her work is held in private collections across the UK, USA, Europe and Australia.
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What unites every strand of Reddy-Devlin's output — from the quiet Croatian landscapes to the sci-fi-inflected mixed-media works — is a commitment to density of attention. These are images that refuse to give themselves up at a glance. They reward the patient viewer, the person willing to come close, to follow a line, to lose themselves in a detail. In an age of images designed to be consumed instantly, that insistence on slowness and depth feels both countercultural and quietly essential.
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Wwab.us and artavita.com