About the Artists
About the Artists
Embedded Files
Suman Chandra and Amy Parrish live in Shantiniketan, a UNESCO World Heritage site developed by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and met while coordinating for the inaugural Bengal Biennale international art festival. Coming from their own independent art practices, the pair recognized overlapping interests and creative sensibilities, opening the door for collaboration. Their work spans painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, alternative process, new media, poetry, personal essay, film, and performance. Both are drawn to organic materials, symbolism and scientific query.
Suman Chandra and Amy Parrish live in Shantiniketan, a UNESCO World Heritage site developed by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, and met while coordinating for the inaugural Bengal Biennale international art festival. Coming from their own independent art practices, the pair recognized overlapping interests and creative sensibilities, opening the door for collaboration. Their work spans painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, alternative process, new media, poetry, personal essay, film, and performance. Both are drawn to organic materials, symbolism and scientific query.
Suman’s earlier works engaged coal as both medium and subject, responding to its chemical instability, industrial history and role in shaping extractive landscapes. Amy has worked with natural pigments and soil chromatography, using these processes to register mineral composition and environmental change. Her chromatographic studies function as material records, producing visual traces that index the land’s physical transformation. Collectively they have shifted attention to human connection and deep observation of the natural world, as well as what exists beyond our view.
Suman’s earlier works engaged coal as both medium and subject, responding to its chemical instability, industrial history and role in shaping extractive landscapes. Amy has worked with natural pigments and soil chromatography, using these processes to register mineral composition and environmental change. Her chromatographic studies function as material records, producing visual traces that index the land’s physical transformation. Collectively they have shifted attention to human connection and deep observation of the natural world, as well as what exists beyond our view.
Individually, their works have been recognized through solo exhibitions, photography festivals, awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, Hyundai’s Art for Hope grant, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, and featured in international publications as well as academic research and dissertations.
Suman Chandra
Suman Chandra
Suman Chandra is an artist from West Bengal, India’s first coal mining region and home to the world’s second largest untapped coal block. His practice draws from a decade of extensive field research on colliery landscapes and their influence on communities and cultures in the periphery; particularly the altered forms, materials and traditions of Sohrai painting.
His visual vocabulary often explores the tension between bleak, formidable terrain and a sense of poetry within it. A cohesive thread runs through the materiality of his work, which uses organic materials found in mining zones such as coal dust, soil and gas emissions rising from surface cracks above a burning mine. These materials act as both medium and document, linking the visual language of his work to the geological and social changes unfolding in these landscapes.
Chandra received his MFA from Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, and his work has been recognized with the Elizabeth Greenshields grant, Hyundai’s Art for Hope award and CIMA’s solo show award, among several other honors and fellowships.
Amy Parrish
Amy Parrish
Amy Parrish is an American artist and writer raised on more than 200 acres of Appalachian foothills; now at home in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, India. Her work engages with themes of transformation as well as the intricate connections between land, loss, memory, and identity.
Festival selections include Indian Photo Fest, Beirut Image Festival, Kuala Lumpur PhotoAwards, Angkor Photo Festival, and Scotland’s ACTINIC Festival. Other notable highlights include an NPR feature, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award and studio practice filmed for two seasons of Photovision.
She has been an industry mentor, educating and inspiring other creative professionals through workshops and conferences. Her writing can be found on a number of platforms, including LensCulture, where she has also reviewed hundreds of portfolios from contemporary photographers around the globe. She’s crafted narratives for nonprofits and social enterprises to help secure grant funding and ran ground operations for anti-trafficking photography programs in India and Thailand.
Suman and Amy CV.pdfThis collaborative project receives synergetic input from Animesh Maity, our partner in the Nameless Collective.
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