School of Creative
Industries
Devika Sundar
Devika’s artistic and curatorial practice spans various mediums, integrating collage, painting and printmaking with photography, assemblage and installation.
Exploring art as a restorative and rehabilitative medium, her work addresses themes of invisibility, illness, memory and impermanence within personal and collective human experience. Devika has presented her work in exhibitions and festivals across India, and has facilitated community art workshops and sessions for children and adults across diverse backgrounds and settings.
During her clinical training in the MA Art Therapy programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Devika has worked with children and adolescents with long-term illnesses, degenerative diseases and developmental disabilities, as well as at a domestic violence shelter, where she worked with women and children survivors of domestic violence.
Devika seeks to integrate her experience as an artist and arts researcher into her therapeutic practice, with a particular interest in how therapeutic art experiences can assist in exploring and expressing invisible physical conditions.
Work
Residues
Lightbox installation
Series of three (30 x 20 cm each)
(2025)
A scar is an area of healing tissue that repairs and regenerates after an injury. Scars, lesions, bruises and markings on our skin, imprint, engrave and embody our respective memories and histories. They reflect not just traces of a life lived but can also serve as an exterior landscape and layer of our internal worlds—revealing stories of resilience, healing, transition and transformation.
Many of our past experiences are settled deep within our unconscious and internalised into our inner world. Often, difficult experiences and memories can remain unprocessed and dormant, hidden and buried beneath the surface. As art therapists, we witness and observe the ways in which these experiences slowly surface, unravel and manifest in the creative process.
As an art therapist in training, Devika is particularly interested in exploring the imprints and residues that are concealed, contained and carried between client and therapist within the therapeutic space. Through amorphous forms, shifting layers, light, text and textures, she explores our bodies and selves as transitory sites of healing and renewal—tracing the marks, memories, remnants and residues that linger and remain within us.
