Featured image: Rorschach Boogie, Anna Mathai, 2024, plaster and limestone, 30 x 40 in. / 76.2 x 101.6 cm.
Anna Mathai’s works blur the lines between material and memory, architecture and atmosphere.
Anna Mathai creates layered, abstract landscapes using mixed media to explore space, time, memory, and psychological terrain.
Using mixed media, including plaster, wax, and natural pigments, Mathai constructs dimensional compositions that evoke dream logic, spatial distortion, and psychological introspection. Her visual language leans on geometry, texture, and illusion, leading the viewer through landscapes both physical and emotional. This article explores three standout pieces: Guilty by Dissociation, Time Warp, and Strange Shores, each one offering a layered meditation on perception and place.
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Guilty by Dissociation, Anna Mathai, 2024, mixed media, 30 x 40 in. / 76.2 x 101.6 cm.
In Guilty by Dissociation, Mathai crafts a fractured topography that feels at once distant and intimate. Blue-toned arches and undulating textures draw the viewer into a space that seems to resist fixed interpretation. The central green chevron, framed by vertical streaks, acts like an entryway, or warning. A curved black line, resembling a horizon or threshold, bisects the composition, suggesting a split between worlds or states of being. The use of physical texture, grass, sticks, and layered paint, adds an organic friction to this psychological landscape. It's a disjointed vision of memory and identity, as if trying to reassemble a fragmented internal archive.
Time Warp, Anna Mathai, 2024, plaster and wax on wood, 10 x 10 in. / 25.4 x 25.4 cm.
Time Warp is a hypnotic construction of circular energy. Painted in serene greens and whites, with golden rings radiating from the center, the piece suggests a cosmic portal or inner awakening. The texture, achieved through plaster and wax, softens the transitions between earth and sky, past and future. A streak of celestial blue breaks through the radial symmetry like a memory piercing the present. This small but powerful piece invites reflection on time as both linear and looping, external and internal. Mathai’s circles don’t just organize space, they bend it.
Strange Shores, Anna Mathai, 2024, mixed media, 30 x 40 in. / 76.2 x 101.6 cm.
With Strange Shores, Mathai leans into surreal seascape territory. Rows of overlapping, scale-like textures in cool blues give the illusion of a rippling aquatic terrain, viewed from above or within. Floating above this wave-formed surface are two rectangular portals, one soft yellow, one rust orange, hovering like doorways to other dimensions. The abstracted clouds and swirling sky frame the scene with both motion and unease. This work conjures the feeling of standing at the edge of a strange world, where the laws of nature and geometry begin to unravel. It’s meditative, alien, and uncannily familiar.
Anna Mathai’s 2024 series pulls viewers into alternate landscapes, crafted not from reality, but from perception, dislocation, and longing. Across textures and forms, her works reveal how memory distorts space and how materials can evoke what the mind cannot clearly name. Whether evoking dissociation, time dilation, or liminal terrains, Mathai’s art captures the ineffable tension between body and thought, landscape and psyche.
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Outdoor Nap, Anna Mathai, 2024, plaster and limestone on wood, 10 x 10 in. / 25.4 x 25.4 cm.
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