TextaQueen is known for using the humble fibre-tip marker (aka ‘texta’) to draw out complex politics of gender, race, sexuality and identity in vividly detailed works on paper. Their portraiture-focused practice expands across the photographic medium, murals, self-publishing, animations, performance and more to imagine an ever-expanding created universe representative of the psychic survival process of a person of colour amongst cultural and colonial legacies. 

Creating in collaboration with other ‘other-ed’ people and via examining their own existence as a person of Indian origin living on others’ ancestral lands, TextaQueen re-frames subjective experiences into critiques of their broader structural contexts, centering representations of ‘marginalised’ identities in complicated states of empowerment. 

TextaQueen’s work has been showcased widely including Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; de Young Museum and SOMArts, San Francisco; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; Elga Wimmer Gallery, New York and Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany and is held in collections such as National Gallery of Victoria, National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, University of Queensland, and Heide Museum of Modern Art. 

Residencies include Police Point Shire Park, Portsea; Bundanon Trust, Illaroo; Monash University, Caulfield, International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; mentorships with Emory Douglas and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina in Oakland, California; a 2017 State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship and ACME, London via Australia Council for the Arts. A nationally touring mid-career survey show of TextaQueen’s work toured nationally in 2017 and 2018 via Mornington Peninsular Regional Gallery, Victoria.

They are currently buzzing up TheySwarm: an artist residency for diverse and dispersed artists in their Collingwood shopfront studio.

They live and work on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nations. 

photo: Leah Jing