Poetics of Emptiness
In my master’s project, Poetics of Emptiness, I explore the emotional resonance of interior architectural spaces through atmospheric watercolor paintings. This work is rooted in personal experiences of displacement and separation from home. Through this lens, I investigate how physical distance transforms our relationship with domestic spaces—how absence intensifies memory, how stillness holds emotional weight, and how the places we’ve left behind continue to shape our sense of belonging and identity.
The idea of home lies at the center of this inquiry. It is not merely a physical dwelling but a space of safety, familiarity, and belonging. Having moved from India to a new environment, I find myself navigating between two senses of home — the remembered and the newly inhabited. This in-betweenness forms the emotional ground of my practice, where I translate feelings of comfort, displacement, and longing into quiet visual atmospheres.
Through delicate washes, controlled transparency, and architectural framing, I create intimate, contemplative environments where thresholds, doorways, and windows hold symbolic and emotional weight. These elements function as metaphors for transition — the shifting states between inside and outside, memory and presence.
Poetics of Emptiness emerges from personal reflection in dialogue with broader ideas about space, memory, and emotion. Watercolor—with its transparency, fluidity, and fragility—allows me to capture these subtle qualities of perception and feeling. The work invites viewers to experience space not as something static or enclosed, but as a vessel for reverie, intimacy, and quiet psychological resonance.
A Room That Remembers
“A room that remembers.
Light entering through a curtain that moves like breath.
The air holds stories-of where I came from and where I now stand Between the two, silence becomes my language.”
In this Australia house where I live, I spend long hours sitting in spaces like this.A chair rests in a empty room, through layered doorways, I see a window with white curtains moving softly, as if touched by breath.
The light coming through that distant window fills these rooms with a quiet heaviness. When I sit here, looking through these thresholds, the air touches my face gently, reminding me of home in India—of my family’s presence, of all the memories there.
This space holds a paradox: it feels both empty and full. Empty because it lacks everything familiar—the warmth of my culture, my family, the festivals I’m missing. The walls are quiet, the colors muted, almost bare.
Yet it’s deeply full. This room absorbs my emotions, holds the weight of migration, carries my longing. Sometimes I talk to my family on video calls here, and their voices seem to inhabit these empty spaces, filling them with invisible presence. The corridor draws my eyes inward, one space leading into another, like walking through memory itself. The warm landscape glowing outside contrasts with the cool greys inside—a conversation between where I am and where I belong. Between two worlds, silence becomes my language.
Saree as Memory Space
At Diwali we slept on the terrace, under a sari of stars. My grandmother named the constellations as if they were relatives— the border became a horizon, the tikdi began to shimmer, and I fell asleep before the endings of her stories. This frame is that hush—the place where the fabric keeps speaking after the pictures stop.
This work outlines the conceptual, material, and emotional processes that evolved the development of my installation Saree as Memory Space.
The work extends from my ongoing studio research on emotional atmospheres in interior spaces and examines how material can become a vessel of memory and belonging. Through the integration of fabric, drawing, and light, this installation transforms a deeply personal object — my grandmother’s saree — into an architectural and emotional framework that bridges two geographies: India and Australia.
Conceptual Framework
The installation emerges from my lived experience of migration and dislocation. After moving away from India I have found myself drawn to stillness to quiet, emptied rooms that hold traces of emotional presence.
My earlier watercolour paintings explored such spaces: corners, doorways, thresholds and windows that evoke the sense of something just passed or about to occur. Gradually, I began to sense that these atmospheres could extend beyond the surface of the paper into real space — that they could be inhabited rather than merely depicted. At the center of this exploration is my grandmother’s saree, a silk fabric woven with fine embroidery and saturated with memory.
She purchased it twenty-seven years ago for my parents’ wedding, later gifting it to me on my own.
When I moved to Australia, she sent it to me folded carefully, carrying the scent of her cupboard, of starch, clay, and incense. The tactile encounter of opening that parcel — touching the silk, breathing in its familiar smell — became an embodied moment of recognition, collapsing the distance between past and present. This became the emotional root of the project: the saree as both object and presence, both material and metaphor.
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.
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