HAMSHYA rAJKUMAR

emerging artist award 2020

Hamshya Rajkumar is a multidisciplinary artist. She graduated with a BA(Hons) Sculpture & Environmental Art from the Glasgow School of Art in 2018, and Land Arts of the American West 2016 alumna. By situating the body outside the constraints of binary structures, she explores our human place in a world where ‘nature’ is separate, dominated and objectified. Her performance work strives to reveal the spectrality of multiple scales of coexisting lifeforms as a social body. Her experience in dance originates in Bharathanatyam, leading her to experiment with improvised dance, movement and physical performance. Recently she has completed the Emerging Socially Engaged Artist Residency at Mount Stuart.

For the BUZZCUT Emerging Artist Award, Hamshya will undergo a research process into Ecologies of Land+|Sea:scapes. She defines this as aspects of natural Land & Sea, including the sounds and behaviours of animals, which are embedded into human language and gesture, forming the foundations of culture, and how the cultural qualities or norms they birth champion, restrict or shame our bodies.

This will culminate in an immersive performative soundscape, manipulating animal & human codes & sounds which are used as acts of way-finding, such as distorting the oscillations of bats calls which are akin to techno music. The aim is to create a space which alleviates the alienation contemporary urban society feels to what is deemed as ‘The Natural World’.

She will develop this piece over 2020 & 2021 & show it in 2021.

The BUZZCUT Emerging Artist Award offers seed funding, mentoring and residency space for a Scotland based Live Artist with under 2 years experience. It is made possible with the support of the Centre for Contemporary Arts & funding from Creative Scotland.