PROFILE

Mahalakshmi Kannappan is a Singapore-based visual artist originally from India. Her practice is grounded in material transformation, working primarily with reconstituted charcoal and plaster. She explores themes of impermanence, rupture, and quiet endurance, often allowing the materials to carry their own tension and memory. Mahalakshmi is represented by Gajah Gallery and has exhibited widely in Singapore, India, Indonesia, and Japan. Her solo shows include Singular Moments (2020) and Perpetual Shift (2024). She has participated in major art fairs such as Art SG, Art Jakarta, SEA Focus, and the India Art Fair. She continues to develop new bodies of work exploring the intersection of material memory, cultural identity, and layered stillness.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Mahalakshmi Kannappan’s practice revolves around the emotional and material tension between fragility and endurance. Working with reconstituted charcoal and plaster, she explores themes of impermanence, rupture, and quiet coexistence. Her forms are not shaped through gesture but through fracture and repair, layers of time held together by tension. In her work, black is not a surface treatment but the material itself. Charcoal, when broken, layered, and bound, becomes both form and memory. Plaster, with its natural stillness, contrasts this fragility, holding space for what resists repair. Together, these materials speak not through colour, but through the sediment of their own transformation.

This body of work responds to the layered stillness Mahalakshmi has observed across the places she inhabits. Some environments allow marks to persist, while others seek to erase them. Through each fracture and surface tension, she reflects on what stays behind and how silence can hold presence. For Mahalakshmi, stillness is not about peace, it is a form of endurance, built from contradiction and held through time.