Asha Maria Dare (b.1989 UK) is a contemporary artist of Tamil Sri Lankan and British heritage. Raised between Hong Kong, England, the United States, Sri Lanka and Australia; her practice reflects a life shaped by movement and cultural multiplicity. Dare’s work investigates the entanglements of diasporic identity, memory and material, exploring themes of womanhood, eroticism and bi-cultural inheritance . Central to her practice is an ongoing engagement with her maternal Tamil heritage from a small rural island off the north coast of Sri Lanka. Through this lens, her work enters into dialogue with colonial histories, civil war and her familial story of migration. Dare’s work resists conventional labels or genre and instead leans into versitility and a liberated mood. She examines the tension between abstraction and representation both in painting and drawing and across diverse mediums; emphasising process, gesture and intuitive making. Influenced by the ideas of new materialism, she approaches materials as active agents within the work, capable of embodying emotive and existential qualities.
She lives and works on Wurundjeri land.
Selected works.
CV