Tanvi Kant is an interdisciplinary artist based in East Sussex UK. She makes textile jewellery, tactile participatory installations, collage and more recently experiments in clay sculpture and painting. Themes include reworking materials with a sensitivity of spiritual, folk and cultural heritage, repetition and sensory stimulation of tactility, colour and visual play through organic structural forms.
She repurposes textiles through elemental hand-construction techniques by unpicking, wrapping, coiling, knotting, and stitching sculptural textile forms. She works with reclaimed saris, dressmaking off-cuts and unwanted textiles sourced from her circles of family, friends and local tailors. Fabrics imbued with private and collective socio-cultural histories are transformed into abstracted organic forms for hybrid identities to emerge.
Recollections of experiences from her British-Gujarati upbringing draw on personal memories of rituals, adornment, food-making and language. They resurface as signifiers of cultural and bodily memory synthesising the personal and the universal.
Since graduating in 2005 she has won numerous awards and exhibited internationally. Her work is part of the public collection at Touchstones Museum and Art Gallery, Lancashire UK.
Tanvi has extensive experience as a visiting tutor in adult education and further education to postgraduate degree level. 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.