Tanvi Kant is an interdisciplinary artist based in East Sussex, UK. Her work explores embodied memories by transforming primarily reclaimed materials through repetitive hand movements with minimal tools. She makes tactile sculpture, participatory installations, textile jewellery, collage and assemblage that explore themes of flexibility and the multiple possibilities of form.
Her exploration of the interrelationship between process and action is led by responding to the intrinsic qualities of materials. And with reverence for the destructive and generative actions of unpicking and remaking. By reflecting on the impact of actions on materials, physical acts of making are infused with playful sensory responses. Organic forms reflecting the dynamism of line and the rhythmic qualities of colour are created through unashamedly simple techniques. These include wrapping, coiling, knotting, layering and hand-stitching.
Recollections of experiences from her British-Gujarati heritage draw upon personal memories of rituals, adornment, food-making/sharing and language. They resurface as signifiers of cultural and bodily memory synthesising the personal and the universal.
Tanvi has extensive experience as a visiting tutor across adult, further and higher education. She regularly works with the public, families and community groups encouraging participants to respond to their visual and tactile senses through materials and to support intergenerational learning experiences.
Since graduating in 2005 she has won numerous awards, and exhibited, taught and undertaken residencies internationally. Her work is part of the public collection at Touchstones Museum and Art Gallery, Lancashire UK.