Sumi's Artistic Journey

Sumi’s modern abstract art is rooted in her exploration of colour theory and repetition in mark-making. Working with white and the three primary colours—red, yellow, and blue—she creates a distinctive acrylic palette. Through repetitive mark-making, she achieves a sense of balance, rhythm, and harmony across her compositions.

Places Near and Far is her first solo exhibition, featuring over 30 original works of modern abstract art. The collection draws inspiration from her solo travels to the Namib Desert in Namibia, the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil, the Iberian Peninsula and Cornwall. Her work reflects her wide range of interests, including social history, geography, metaphysics, philosophy, mathematics, aesthetics and artificial intelligence.

Sumi views the universe as an interconnected system shaped by structure and information, spanning both rational and metaphysical realms. She believes colour functions as a universal language that connects human experience. Life, in her view, is a continuous interplay of memory, perception, and anticipation.

Her artistic influences include Mark Rothko, Emily Kam Kngwarray, Hilma af Klint and Yayoi Kusama, as well as French and Spanish Impressionists and Surrealists. She also draws inspiration from Indian sacred geometry in art and architecture, Japanese minimalism, and the utopian ideals found in primitivism and ancient artistic practices. These influences intersect with traditions and ideas often described as historicism, tribalism, shamanism, totemism, fauvism, folk art, naïve art, and paganism.

Sumi reflects on how our sense of reality—our “inner selves”—is mapped from the past, with memories handed down from generation to generation by our ancestors. We exist in the present within this relative framework of time and space – grounded in the present, surrounded by a natural world that appears constant – the oceans, deserts, and mountains. The food we consume is drawn from the geo-physical elements that sustain life—earth, air, water, and fire.

We move with time, into the future. As every second that passes, the world is changing, relational, fleeting and often illusory.  Even the seemingly immutable world is subject to change, as seen in the shifting sands of African deserts that have travelled across continents to Brazil.

Through her work, Sumi invites you to reflect on the fluid nature of reality and our perceptions of time and place, using a kaleidoscope of colour.