Acknowledgment of Country

I acknowledge and pay my respects to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I live and work in Naarm/Melbourne. I pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging, and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.

Artist Statement

Drashti Kalathiya is an Indian–Australian visual artist based in Melbourne. Living away from her home country has deeply shaped the way she relates to space, memory, and belonging. When she first moved to Australia, she began painting suburban surroundings—quiet streets, interiors, and windows filled with soft light—as a way to process the feeling of distance from home and the people she misses.

Her practice explores how architectural and domestic spaces hold traces of emotion, memory, and absence. Through delicate layers of watercolour, Kalathiya focuses on thresholds—doorways, corners, and windows—as metaphors for transition, longing, and stillness. These in-between spaces reflect both her personal experience of migration and a broader sense of introspection that arises from existing between two homes.

Working with softness, restraint, and sensitivity to light, her paintings turn inward—toward the emotional and psychological architecture of everyday spaces. Within these quiet interiors, silence and emptiness become carriers of presence, memory, and emotional resonance, transforming the familiar into poetic reflections on belonging and displacement.

Biography

Drashti Kalathiya (she/her, b. 1999) is an Indian–Australian visual artist living and working in Melbourne. She holds a Master of Fine Art from RMIT University (2025) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Surat School of Fine Arts, Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, India (2020).

In 2024, Kalathiya migrated to Australia, marking a new phase in her artistic practice as an international student and emerging artist. Her work has been exhibited at Site Eight Gallery (RMIT University, 2025), Vanita Art Gallery (Surat, 2021), and Tulsiyan Art Gallery (Surat, 2019). She was a finalist for an art residency in the UK (2019) and received the Best Painting Student Award from Veer Narmad South Gujarat University (2020).

Her current body of work continues to expand the language of watercolour, exploring stillness, liminality, and the emotional resonance of domestic and architectural space.