Tarah Kandial is a fine artist from London, of Indo-Guyanese and English descent, now based in South Wales. Primarily self-taught, she has also studied art through a psychological and therapeutic lens at postgraduate level. Her practice focuses on developing a visual language that explores the nuances of culture, belonging, land and identity through her layered, mixed-media paintings.

Artist Statement

Sitting somewhere between reality and fantasy, Tarah Kandial’s work explores the psychic, spiritual, emotional, and physical spaces we inhabit, particularly through the lens of navigating multiple, and at times conflicting, identities.

Her practice unfolds as a dialogue with space, time, land, and self, engaging with spatial and ancestral memory. While elements of trauma surface within the work, she seeks to centre the retelling of Global Majority narratives beyond frameworks of struggle alone, often through the depiction of faces drawn from archival material and family photographs. In doing so, she unapologetically raises questions around the natural world, erasure, cultural reclamation, the politicisation of space, and the possibilities of generational healing.

Tarah’s current practice explores the sculptural potential of painting through the use of layering and mixed media. Her works have become increasingly tactile, taking on a patchwork-like quality shaped by cycles of construction, destruction, and reconstruction. Within these layered surfaces, some fragments remain visible while others are concealed or transformed. This cyclical process speaks to the instability of memory and the tension between what is remembered, inherited, and reimagined. In this way, the works function as both material objects and ritual acts — gestures of reclamation, preservation, and ongoing dialogue.