Featured image: Cleaning the Cat Shit, Shivani Bhalla, 2015, gauche and watercolor on paper, 17 x 22 in. / 43.18 x 55.88 cm.
Shivani Bhalla’s deeply evocative works, created with gouache, watercolor, and mixed media on rice paper, exist at the intersection of narrative, memory, and myth.
Shivani Bhalla creates narrative-driven works that blend folklore, memory, and domestic life through gouache and watercolor on handmade paper.
Through fragmented vignettes, Bhalla constructs dreamlike storyboards that reference childhood impressions, folklore, domestic life, and surreal visual logic. Her deliberately naïve forms and disjointed compositions reflect the haziness of memory and the complexity of cultural inheritance.
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Bear Hunt, Shivani Bhalla, 2017, gauche and watercolor on rice paper, 32 x 24 in. / 81.28 x 60.96 cm.
In “Bear Hunt” (2017), Bhalla captures a disjointed, symbolic journey across four panels. Figures engage in bizarre and sometimes humorous interactions, riding bears, holding sunflowers beside sports cars, kneeling before flaming altars. These vignettes suggest both childhood imagination and collective myth-making, drawing viewers into a world where animals, gestures, and human figures blend into cryptic folklore. The aged paper and gentle palette enhance the work’s nostalgic aura.
Overgrowth, Shivani Bhalla, 2021, gauche and watercolor on rice paper, 32 x 24 in. / 81.28 x 60.96 cm.
“Overgrowth” (2021) is more architectural in tone, with rich browns and golds evoking aged documents or palimpsests. Bhalla overlays figures. some sleeping, some in action, with plants, brick walls, rugs, and woven beds. The domestic merges with the ancestral, creating a tapestry of everyday life animated by memory and layered history. Her mark-making mimics embroidery or ancient script, reinforcing the idea of life as a fabric stitched from countless interwoven moments.
A Clever Fox That Was Not So Clever, Shivani Bhalla, 2020, gauche and mixed media on paper, 15 x 22 in. / 38.1 x 55.88 cm.
In “A Clever Fox That Was Not So Clever” (2020), Bhalla continues her narrative exploration using smaller compositions with delicate restraint. Children, animals, and everyday rural objects populate the landscape, with a notable focus on surveillance, the fox, the hammock, the wall peeker, all suggest watchfulness. A story unfolds through posture and repetition rather than clear cause and effect. This piece reflects on misjudgment and innocence, offering a parable-like reflection wrapped in ambiguity.
Together, these three works form a narrative triad that blurs autobiography, myth, and cultural symbolism. Shivani Bhalla’s art invites us to re-enter the language of picture books, campfire tales, and fleeting memories, not to solve them, but to live among their textures and silences. Her work is a poetic archive of ephemeral truths, embodied through painted paper.
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