Mala Hassett United Kingdom
Born in India and now living in Dorset, I make abstract paintings shaped by colour, memory and place. Drawing on both locations, the work explores how colour can carry experience, distance and belonging.
I begin with landscape — its graphic lines and shapes giving me a composition to work with. Sometimes this is the Dorset coastline, sometimes a researched image from elsewhere. Once the structure is in place, I imagine it as a sari: a landscape dressed in Indian textile.
Paint is applied without brushes — pigment rubbed by hand into oil on the surface, alongside card, sponge rollers cut to different widths and other tools — producing surfaces that retain the memory of their making. Grids, striations and woven textures recur throughout, owing as much to textile as to clifftop geology. Where restraint and excess coexist, which in a good sari they always do, is where I want the paintings to sit.
Dorset provides the starting point. Colour usually has other plans.
