About the Artist:
Hema Bharadwaj (b. 1974, Bagalkot, India) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans watercolor, oils, and ceramics. She explores the liminal space between caretaking and creation, drawing on personal experiences of motherhood, menopause, migration, and domestic life. Bharadwaj’s work captures the rhythms of daily life—stuffed pantries, garden weeds, cluttered kitchen islands—and reveals their capacity for spiritual resonance and emotional depth. Her compositions often emerge from inner states of flux and flow, mapping an interior terrain where the divine and mundane intermingle.
Raised in India and having lived across several countries, Bharadwaj brings a global sensibility to her work, inflected by her deep connection to her Indian heritage. She holds a BFA from Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai and an MFA in Illustration as Visual Essay from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
She has exhibited widely, including solo and group exhibitions at Chashama (Matawan, NJ), Arts Council of Princeton (NJ), The Center for Contemporary Art (Bedminster, NJ), Studio 115 LB (Long Beach, CA), and the School of Visual Arts (NYC). She is also a teaching artist with the Arts Council of Princeton and teaches privately from her home studio.
Currently based in New Jersey and Bangalore, Bharadwaj shares her home and studio life with her husband, grown children, and a gracefully aging dog. Through expressive, often abstract works, she invites viewers to pause, reflect, and rediscover meaning in the overlooked details of everyday life.
Artist Statement:
My practice is rooted in the quiet, recurring gestures of daily life — the way light shifts across a kitchen wall, sorting ingredients, digging into the garden; these ordinary rhythms often reveal something vast and unspoken, a pulse that connects the intimate with the infinite. Working with watercolors, oils, and clay, I search for the cosmic within the domestic.
I draw inspiration from stories, memory, and the natural world. The language of my work is both contemplative and tactile — layers of pigment, translucent washes, or the weight of clay pressed by hand. Each piece becomes an offering, an invitation to pause, to look again, to feel the hum of something ancient beneath the surface of the everyday. Forms and shapes come forth and match the inner dialog, allowing me to set down tributaries of thoughts, so i might return to the main river and flow again freely.
