Krishna Shanthi is a designer, artist, curator and critical & theoretical lecturer based in London UK. (more...)

The Blue Garden: Gathering of memory, myth and desire
12–16 August 2026
Limbo, Margate
Commissioned by Kavel Rafferty
Supported by Margate Pride Art Map

The Blue Garden brings together works I have made over the past several years. Combining digital collage, textiles, painting, found imagery, and archival material, the exhibition traces recurring interests in Hindu iconography, queer visual culture, migratory histories and the colour blue.

Throughout the exhibition, images move between different contexts and traditions. Blue-skinned deities appear alongside magazines, pearls, flowers, dolls and historical photographs. Familiar figures are reworked, combined and transformed, creating images that sit between devotion, fantasy, and everyday experience.

At the centre of the exhibition are new large-scale silk works inspired by the pearl fisheries of northern Sri Lanka. These works bring together archival photographs, images of pearls, Hindu imagery, and references to the Tamil homeland. Rather than presenting historical narratives directly, the works assemble fragments from different sources, allowing connections to emerge between place, memory and imagination.

The title The Blue Garden takes inspiration from Michel Foucault’s description of the garden as a space where different worlds can exist together. Across the exhibition, images collected, made and reworked over time are brought into conversation with one another. Blue remains a constant presence throughout the exhibition. Sometimes it appears as the skin of a deity, sometimes as a surface painted over a found image, and sometimes as a landscape or atmosphere. Covering and transforming the images beneath it, blue becomes a way of looking at familiar subjects anew.

The Blue Garden presents the exhibition space as a place of gathering: a collection of images, stories, objects, and references accumulated over time. Together, these works reflect an ongoing interest in how images travel, change meaning and become part of our understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.

Photography by Betty Saunders
Installation by Tim Crowley
Framing by The Framing Room

Krishna Shanthi

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