Talia Ramkilawan is visual artist and teacher living and working in Cape Town.
Ramkilawan’s work aims to address her own lived experience with South African Indian identity and culture. She uses wool to visualize the complexity of one’s relationship to her and her world. Talia's work serves as a personal exercise in both reckoning and healing: needling through her relationships with self, family, friends, lovers, queerness, South African Indian-ness, indenture, and a chain of social and historical complexities that follows.
Central to Talia Ramkilawan’s practice is rug hooking, a slow, accumulative process with which she creates her “tapestry adjacent” wall pieces. Her more recent preoccupations include intimacy, vulnerability and softness as expressed in everyday life.
"Transformation does not require that we suffer or torture ourselves. It can happen in quiet moments of peace and stillness too". says Ramkilawan.
Talia Ramkilawan graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Arts with honours in 2018 and from the University of Cape Town with a Postgraduate Diploma in Education in 2019.