To visit the new V&A East museum in London, one must walk across a massive installation embedded into the cement floor outside it. The great white ceramic circles interconnected on vines, look a lot like flowers, segments of DNA or some entangled design. But artist Lubna Chowdhary, who created it, refers to it as her own giant kolam at the threshold of East London’s art district.
Chowdhary was born in Tanzania to parents of South Asian origin and moved to England at a young age. She cites big-city architecture, especially in the industrial area of Rochdale in Greater Manchester, as a big influence. She was also her mother’s helper in her job as a seamstress. But at London’s Royal College of Art, she chose to study ceramics because she loved the idea of moulding clay to whatever form she desired.
The label under many of her pieces includes the word ceramics – they’re anything but craft pottery. Many of Chowdhary’s works combine unusual materials, use both handmade and industrial techniques, but almost always result in vivid and modular structures in bold, saturated colours. She brings her experiences of two worlds, two cultures into her work in a way that gets viewers to wonder about the authenticity of their own cultural upbringing.
Perhaps a good way to think about Chowdhary’s works is to consider the idea of hybridity. Look at her Serial Structures: Installations composed of multiple individually hand-glazed tiles arranged on wooden shelves. These ceramic panels are coloured and patterned cut-outs of different forms and shapes – some geometric, some circular, some asymmetrical. At first glance, their arrangement resembles a retro pop-art display cabinet, with flat silhouettes of somewhat familiar objects in bold colours. But to those looking closer, those individual ceramic forms reveal architectural references, with fragments of buildings, facades, and industrial and structural elements pointing to a metropolitan cityscape.
Chowdhary’s artistic strength lies in the sheer variety of forms and colours she gets to work together. Each object retains its individuality while contributing to a larger visual rhythm. They draw from both Eastern and Western architectural influences.
In another prominent series, Erratics, she creates wooden sculptures inspired by colonial furniture commissioned by Europeans and made by Indian artisans, and housed in the collection of London’s Victoria & Albert museum. The series builds off the idea that in order to create work that pays well, those Indian artisans would have had to relearn entire cultural concepts. What emerges is a collection of strange yet intricately beautiful objects which sport what she terms an “awkward aesthetic”. They play up the “lost in translation” oddness of 19th-century British designs. Chowdhary has, in interviews, mentioned that Indians traditionally slept on the floor; it would have been hard for them to understand why someone would want to rest on a narrow elevated wooden slab. The works, then, encourage viewers to think about the history of production and the complexity of translating creativity across cultures. Some of these works from the Erratics series were made by combining CNC (computerised numerical control) with traditional handicraft techniques, again highlighting how disparate elements often end up being artistically harmonious.
Artist bio: Zoya Chaudhary is a Singapore-based artist whose installations, collages, drawings and paintings explore identity, culture and memory.
From HT Brunch, May 30, 2026
Follow us on www.instagram.com/htbrunch
