Portfolio

Umayal Annamalai is a Charlotte based multidisciplinary artist and cultural practitioner whose work explores interconnectedness, ancestral memory, and future-forward harmony through contemporary and Indofuturistic visual language. Rooted in South Indian artistic traditions and informed by embodied practice, her work bridges geometry, portraiture, pattern, and symbolism to examine how art can restore collective and emotional balance.

Her practice draws heavily from kolam traditions, sacred geometry, and continuous linework often formed through a single, uninterrupted line. This approach reflects the concept of the sacred thread: an infinite flow of energy with no beginning and no end, connecting human, nature, and cosmos. Recurring motifs such as birds, organic forms, and circular and diamond geometries signify liberation, continuity, and cyclical time.

Through portraiture, Umayal centers the body as a site of memory and possibility. Her figures are often positioned in dialogue with nature, gazing toward imagined futures while remaining grounded in ancestral wisdom. This visual narrative reflects her ongoing inquiry into belonging, sovereignty, and hope—particularly within diasporic and feminine experiences.

In addition to her studio practice, Umayal is the founder of Creative Harmony Arts, an arts-based platform dedicated to emotional alchemy, embodied creativity, and cultural connection. Through community workshops, public art programs, and facilitated experiences, she creates spaces where individuals and communities engage art as a tool for regulation, expression, and collective healing.

Her work has been supported by grants and partnerships with arts and cultural institutions and has been exhibited in community-centered and contemporary art spaces. Across all formats, Umayal’s work asserts that harmony is not passive-it is practiced, embodied, and reimagined.

Artist Statement

My work lives at the intersection of human fragility and the harmony that emerges when we learn to feel deeply. Through expressive portraiture, sacred geometry, and symbolic abstraction, I explore identity, belonging, and the emotional patterns shaped by our lived experiences. Rooted in Tamil indigenous traditions—particularly kolam—I use dots, lines, and repetition as a visual language to examine how structure and flow coexist within both the inner and outer worlds.

Working across painting, woodblock carving, copper plate etching, and drawing, I translate memory, emotion, and ancestral knowledge into material form. Anxiety, fear, grief, and joy are not avoided in my process—they are alchemized. Once an experience settles within me, it emerges as color, texture, movement, and pattern, transforming pain into presence and fragmentation into coherence.

My portrait work, Embody Every Version of You, explores archetypes that live within us all—the Maiden, Warrior, Empress, and Sovereign—each holding both shadow and light. These figures reflect the fluidity of identity and the reclamation of voice through self-recognition. Alongside this, kolam-based works and symbolic nature imagery—tree-women, birds, florals, lunar forms—extend this inquiry into the collective, positioning geometry as a living system that connects body, land, ritual, and community.

Grounded in an Indo-Futurist perspective, my practice reimagines ancestral wisdom as a guide for inclusive futures. I see art as a threshold: a space where boundaries soften, intuition leads, and belonging becomes felt rather than defined. Through my work, I invite viewers to move beyond duality and into a deeper experience of interconnectedness, harmony, and wholeness.

Through kolam—an ancient Tamil form of sacred geometry—my work explores geometry as an energetic system rather than a purely visual one. Kolam functions as a map of balance, where structure and flow exist in continuous relationship. One does not exist without the other; coherence emerges through their synergy.

This approach reflects my belief that all forms- architectural, natural, and ritual are composed of repeating patterns shaped by rhythm and intention. By translating ancestral symbols into universal geometric language, the work situates sacred geometry within contemporary abstraction, offering geometry not as an end in itself, but as a living system that shapes space, perception, and connection.