Binita Walia (born 1971, Kampala) graduated from Edinburgh College of Art 1994 and the Royal College of Art 1997. Living and working in South East London.
I like to map the cultural, social and physical landscape within communities to make large scale architectural glass commissions for buildings. My work is luminous and vivid, creating magical plays with colour, glass and light that delight the viewer.
Recent projects include A Solar System for Aberdaron which comprises 10 suspended panels for a new National Trust building in Wales. This artwork evokes the pilgrimage, spirituality and landscapes of the Lyn Peninsular. In Butetown, Cardiff I was asked to create a work that would directly reflect the rich local diversity. I evolved local maps into drawings, referenced the maritime history and included drawings of the buildings all on a backdrop of a colourful watercolour landscape suggesting the places local people had come from originally.
Since 2013 I have been exploring my personal historic and contemporary cultural reference points to express ideas about domesticity, relationships and responsibilities. I started using list-making as an artistic process, feeding back and contributing to both my personal life and artistic practice. Using the potency of these lists to express the minutiae of my life, I elevate the ordinary feats of everyday tasks to a higher status by writing and recreating them in gold.
Currently, I am working on A Modern Woman: Portraits. Visualising the relationships between our micro biology, physical self and our place within the universe.
I am attracted to celebrating and elevating the ordinary, mundane and forgotten.