Artist Page for Gajah Gallery - Art Jakarta Gardens, 2025 (23rd April, Wednesday)
Mahalakshmi Kannappan
(b. 1981, India)
Known for her unconventional applications of charcoal, Mahalakshmi Kannappan’s artistic practice challenges the traditional notions of medium and unearths the internal complexities of existence through material experimentation. With combined precision and intuition, the diasporic artist compels (and almost manipulates) her medium of choice beyond its assumed boundaries and limitations — creating obscure and unexpected yet striking compositions that straddle both the pictorial and the sculptural.
Fascinated by the limitless possibilities and nuances in the “black” of charcoal — in its spontaneous and unpredictable reactions to her experiments — Mahalakshmi Kannappan has developed her own bold and abstract yet still somewhat minimalistic visual language and imagery. In her pieces, the forms, the objects, and the medium serve as more than mere tools of composition, but takes centre stage as the subject matters.
Mahalakshmi Kannappan currently works and lives in Singapore.
“Black is not the end, ... It’s the beginning — where light is born, where change happens.”
To Renew
2024, Black Lime Plaster on Wood, 34 x 40 x 3 cm
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As a diasporic artist, Mahalakshmi Kannappan has had to constantly navigate and negotiate with shifting social and cultural landscapes in her construction of identity and belonging. For the artist, To Renew, visually symbolises this process of reassembling disparate shapes in an attempt to create a harmonious whole.
“Kannappan’s work challenges perceptions of shape and surface, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture and thus inviting her practice to be situated within discussions on minimal art
in relation to the discourse on art
and objecthood.”
Contours of Change V
2024, Black Lime Plaster on Wood, 20 x 30 x 3 cm
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Assembled in a rectilinear form, resembling a painting while subtly revealing its sculptural nuances, the composition of Contours of Change V considers the condition of wear, tear, and repair as the artist accentuates texture and alteration in the piece’s material surface to suggest how micro-elements of disruption can exist in gestures of repetition.
Returning Shadows: Fading at Dusk II
2024, Black Lime Plaster on Wood, 102 x 112 x 8 cm
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Capturing the subtle shifts in familiar shapes as the form of shadows blends and becomes indeterminate in their final moments, just before night falls and as daylight is almost completely gone. Returning Shadows: Fading at Dusk II shows an iteration of Mahalakshmi Kannappan’s observation of a quietly transformative moment.
To Renew VI
2024, Black Lime Plaster on Wood, 37 x 37 x 3 cm
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In the artist’s desire to capture and translate memories and ephemeral experiences into permanent forms, her pieces often reflect the underlying ambiguous, fleeting, and impermanent nature of these often overlooked everyday phenomena. To Renew VI features different shapes composed together to create a relief effect, where the layers enhance a sense of dimensionality in the pieces.
Aligned Imperfections IV
2024, Black Lime Plaster on Wood, 55 x 67 x 5 cm
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The accentuated shift in Aligned Imperfections IV, revealed in the placement of equally measured plaster blocks in a grid - highlights how subtle disruptions can create disorder in a uniform arrangement.
“... when left on their own ... [material] behaves and responds
to stimuli in various ways. Some responses are unpredictable and uncontrollable. My work seeks to identify, stimulate, amalgamate
and distort materials to explore their responses.”
No. 04 Synergy of Surfaces
2024, Charcoal on Canvas, 38 x 48 cm
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Edges and surfaces are not demarcated or contained, but are instead marked by ridges and creases, in No. 04 Synergy of Surfaces. Not allowing the flat surface to limit her work, Mahalakshmi Kannappan has experimented with - and expanded - the limitations of charcoal to create a three-dimensional imagery on canvas.
No. 05 Synergy of Surfaces
2024, Charcoal on Canvas, 38 x 48 cm
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Transforming the medium of charcoal into varying consistencies gained Mahalakshmi Kannappan access to an expanded possibility of texture and allowed for her to further push the material into sculptural proportions. This dynamism is evident in No. 05 Synergy of Surfaces, where a range of subtle differences in hue and tonal values can be discerned in the curious way light interacts with the varying surface.