Pooja Pawaskar
Indian-Canadian artist based in Arles, France
Sculpture, ceramics and drawing exploring the shifting boundary between body and vessel.
Vessels, Bodies, Thresholds
Pooja Pawaskar investigates the body as a threshold between containment and autonomy, intimacy and exposure. Working across wood and clay, she explores the vessel as both object and metaphor: a form defined by its capacity to contain, yet still itself when it resists its prescribed function. Through removal and accumulation, bodily forms emerge without representing the body directly, asking what we are expected to hold, what we choose to refuse, and who determines the boundaries of a body.
Exhibitions
SOLO Exhibit, France
DUO EXHIBIT, Conversations w/ TREES
Upon further reflection
THE HEART OF ART
Artist Statement
I am an Indian-born Canadian artist based in Arles, France, working primarily in sculpture, drawing, and ceramics.
My practice explores intimacy, visibility, and the emotional landscapes we carry within us. Shaped by experiences of migration and living across cultures, I am interested in how bodies hold memory, desire, vulnerability, and inherited ways of being.
Working through abstraction, I create forms that evoke the body without fully describing it. Whether carved in wood or shaped in clay, my sculptures inhabit the space between concealment and revelation, protection and exposure. I am drawn to gestures of covering, enclosing, and partially revealing, questioning what we choose to share, what we hide, and how these choices shape our relationships with ourselves and others.
Wood and ceramics offer distinct yet interconnected languages within my practice. Wood, with its knots, cracks, and grain, speaks to resilience and transformation. Clay allows me to explore softness, containment, and the body as vessel. Together, these materials become a means of investigating how personal and collective experiences are carried, remembered, and made visible.
Ultimately, my work invites viewers to reflect on their own experiences of becoming: how we learn to take up space, reveal ourselves, and belong.
