View Kamini Nair in the Online Viewing Room

Born in 1953 in Fiji, Kamini has always favoured flowers within her practice, most likely inspired by a sense of nostalgia toward her home country. Arrangements of blooms, buds, seed pods and grasses provide absolute chromatic opportunity, laying the ground for an utterly exuberant approach to colour that is central to Kamini’s practice.

Essa May Ranapiri authored a poem on Kamini’s work for the exhibition titled Flow/er and near the end Ranapiri explains Kamini’s “…stumble of overlapping pigments…”. That is indeed how Kamini’s colour works; purple trips on pink, slips on white, falls into a pit of black. Across her oeuvre of more than fifty years, no hue remains untouched.

Kamini’s delight isn’t only reserved for colour, a vast energy is also apparent in her approach to paint application. Working with a brush and using acrylics, Kamini’s pictures are built using short, singular, repetitive gestures that begin at any point on the page and navigate outward. Often working with a stiff brush, her marks appear finger like, unfussy and expressive. These cumulative, travelling gestures create a sense of movement throughout each painting and a sense of growth is achieved, or the feeling of wind, or some other dynamic motion.

Kamini Nair is a self-taught artist who is supported to attend Sandz, a studio in Kirikiriroa for artists with intellectual disabilities.