Background

Nandita Mukand was born on October 31, 1975 in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Education

Nandita Mukand attended La Martiniere Girls' College in Lucknow, India.

She also has a Bachelor of Technology degree in Electronics Engineering from the Institute of Engineering and Technology in Lucknow, India (1994-1998). Mukand is also an alumna of the prestigious Indian Institute of Management Calcutta in Kolkata (1998-2000) and has a Post Graduate Diploma in Management.

Having decided to devote herself full-time to art making, Nandita Mukand graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class) from Goldsmiths, University of London by LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore in 2014.

Career

Nandita Mukand began her career as a Research Executive at Reckitt Benckiser in India in 2000-2002. She then became a Senior Manager at Procter and Gamble in Singapore from 2002 to 2008.

​Having quit a successful corporate career with Proctor and Gamble to devote herself full-time to art making in 2008, Nandita Mukand's practice now encompasses sculpture, installation and painting and whose work has been exhibited and collected in Singapore and internationally. Drawing upon her interest in metaphysics, neuroplasticity, quantum physics and contemporary Buddhist texts her work often mingles observations of growth and decay in the wilderness with the workings of the urban mind.

Nandita’s work was included in the OpenART Biennale 2017, Sweden and Imaginarium: To the Ends of the Earth, Singapore Art Museum. Other notable exhibitions include solo shows: Forest Weft, City Warp (2017-2018), The Materiality of Time (2015) and group shows: Exploring BigCi, Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, Australia (2015), Untapped, Chan Hampe Gallery, Singapore (2016), Fundacio L'Olivar Summer Exhibition, Spain (2016).

Nandita Mukand currently lives and works in Singapore.

Achievements

• Nandita Mukand has been awarded artist residencies by the Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiatives in 2014, Australia; the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery in 2015, Australia; the Fundacio L’Olivar in 2016 in Catalonia, Spain; all of which have enabled her to deepen her research into the natural world.
  
  Among her other numerous awards are LASALLE College of the Arts Merit Scholarship in 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 and the Capability Development Grant from the National Arts Council in Singapore in 2016.

Works

More photos

• artwork

  • Burn Your Old Stories to the Ground 2

  • Burn Your Old Stories to the Ground 3

  • Heroics of the Smallest Plant

  • Responding Balancing -the Rhythm of Chaos 1

  • Interwoven Landscapes I

    2017

• installation

  • Quickening

    2018

  • Interwoven II

    2017

  • Beyond the Urban Veil

    2018

  • Uncontained

    2018

  • The Unborn

  • Empty Cocoon I

    2018

  • Empty Cocoon II

    2018

  • Empty Cocoon III

    2018

  • Home is a Blade of Grass I

    2018

  • Home is a Blade of Grass II

    2018

  • Living Plastic I

    2018

  • Living Plastic II

    2018

  • Living Plastic III

    2018

  • Proliferation Accumulation I

    2018

  • Proliferation Accumulation II

    2018

  • Lost Sun

    2018

  • Behind that Vast Sky

    2018

• painting

  • What Lies Below the Surface

    2011

  • Responding Balancing - the Rhythm of Chaos 3

    2015

  • In the Balance of Heaviness

  • Momentarily

    2016

  • Unresting Unhasting 2

    2014

  • Unresting Unhasting 1

    2014

  • What Lies Below

    2014

  • Silent as Light 1

    2014

  • Since Then

    2014

  • Deep in the Forest I Met with Myself 2

    2015

• publication

  • Contemporary Art and the Perceived Self-sufficiency of Urban Life 2015
  • The Transcendental Sublime in Contemporary Art 2015
  • The Evolution Of Contemporary Painting in the Face of Claims of "The Death of Painting" 2015
  • The time of cities and the time of nature

Views

Nandita Mukand finds inspiration from forests, from trees and plants and lichens and moss and fungi and mushrooms - from things that grow and decay. Layers of accretion and erosion as markers of time, resilience in the face of adversity, the grace imbibed in adapting organically to circumstances, the beauty of chaos - these are some of the thoughts that form the backdrop from within which her heavily textured and layered artworks arise.

In her sculptural works, she often breaks down everyday urban and industrial materials and fashions them into organic forms and textures reminiscent of the natural world. The sculptures function as a kind of "urban veil" symbolic of an attempt to look beyond the distractions of city life that obscure and disallow the spiritual clarity that is accessible in Nature. Building up of the sculptures and installations involve repetitive processes that are meditative.

Connections

Nandita Mukand is married to Amit Jain. The couple has a daughter and a son.

Spouse:

Amit Jain

colleague:

Madhvi Subrahmanian