Afloat Series: wallpaper drawings

I am developing a series of drawings based on real-life tragedies of young diasporic South Asian women who were murdered through drowning at the hands of friends and family. For these drawing scrolls I am focusing on the story of Reena Virk, who was swarmed, beaten and drowned by her teenage friends. The drawings utilize certain repeated motifs, including a geometric lattice wallpaper pattern, a pictogram of a floating female figure, eelgrass (that also mimics long black hair) and snippets of handwritten poems focusing on the search for her body that was ultimately found floating in a gorge. Soraya Peerbaye’s evocative poems utilize court transcripts, autopsy reports and vivid descriptions of the natural environment, including the plant and marine life where a young girl lost her life.

(Poetry by Soraya Peerbaye, from Tell: Poems for a Girlhood, 2015)