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.
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
