Mapping Memories with Piyaali B. Samanta

Piyaali is an Artist and Architectural Designer. Her Art is born from a connection to nature, nostalgia, and personal experiences, she is influenced by her cultural roots in India and her background in Architecture. She takes inspiration from mythology, philosophy, history, folk art, architecture, and natural landscapes. Her artworks are layered with her varied experiences, she aspires to merge conscious storytelling and symbolism with the universal language of abstraction blended with recognizable realism. She combines the East with the West, reflecting her hybrid identity, the spiritual to the aesthetic, the ancient philosophy, and iconography to modern narratives. She is engaged in community art education programs, volunteering with various non-profit art organizations/museums, and conducting art classes and workshops in the Bay Area.

Piyaali’s current work explores the concepts of home, community, and roots and how they shape our identity. She investigates themes of nostalgia, human relation to spaces, man-made built forms, landscapes, and how the natural world influences the human psyche. She is in the process of working on a series that maps memory, identity, her family’s migration, culture, and history through mythology and folk-art imagery depicting flora, fauna, landscapes, and architecture of the places she has lived; creating her identity map in a painting series called “My Mappa Mundi.”

Website: http://piyaalibsamanta.com/