Tarah Kandial is a fine artist from London, of Indo-Guyanese and English descent, now based in South Wales. Although primarily self-taught, she has also studied art through a psychological and therapeutic lens at graduate level and is now focused on developing a visual language that is auto-biographical in nature through her richly layered, mixed-media paintings.

Artist Statement

Tarah Kandial’s work sits between reality and fantasy, exploring the psychic, spiritual, emotional, and physical spaces we inhabit, particularly as someone with multiple and often conflicting identities.

Her practice acts as a dialogue with space, time, land and self, exploring spatial and ancestral memory, as well as cultural reclamation. Although trauma and truth are elucidated and honoured, it hopes to centre the retelling of Global Majority stories that are not defined by struggle alone. The faces that recur are often sourced from archives or family photos, standing as unapologetic displays of Black and Brown beauty and wisdom. With this, she is unapologetically raising questions about the natural world, erasure, the politicisation of space, and presenting migration as an ancient and innately human movement.

Tarah is currently interested in exploring the structural qualities of paint when its boundaries are tested. Her works are increasingly tactile and layered, resembling patchworks created through cycles of construction, destruction, and reconstruction.