About the Artist:
Seema Lisa Pandya is a South Asian Brooklyn based multidisciplinary artist and accomplished sustainability consultant who explores the intersection between sustainability, art, culture, physics, biology, and the built environment. Embracing an eco-conscious ethos, she often uses reclaimed and recycled materials. Connecting to morphic ideas of sound and her South Asian heritage, Seema’s tabla sculpture series is made from reclaimed tabla drumheads rhythmically touched by musicians’ hands for a thousand hours reimagined as biomorphic forms. Her work ranges from sculpture, public art, kinetic works, guerrilla art, wall art, woodworking, paintings, video, and even pollinator habitats.
Seema has exhibited works at The MET, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Prospect Park Brooklyn, Governor’s Island, The Narrows Botanical Gardens, Mumbai Contemporary Art Week, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Long Island, Pioneer Works, BRIC Arts, and more with works featured in Time Out NY, NY1 News, Pix11 News, Times of India, Vogue India, CodaWorx Magazine, Fine Woodworking, Hyperallergic and more. Her accolades include being a 2024 and 2025 NYSCA and Brooklyn Arts Council project grant recipient and a 2023 AnkhLave Arts Alliance Fellow. She has participated in art residencies at the Rockefeller Pocantico Estate and Goddard College and received commissions for figures like Khizr Khan and Chelsea Clinton.
Seema contributes actively to her community as an active member of the New York Society of Women Artists, was a NYFA Immigrant Artist program mentor, currently serves on the Board of the Brooklyn Raga Massive music collective, and regularly presents her work at public talks and panels. For example, she was a panelist for Asian Arts Alliance’s “”Art, Environment, and Justice in a Changing World””. Seema is also a respected sustainability consultant and professor teaching environmental building courses at the New York School of Interior Design.
Artist Statement:
While learning to play the percussive tabla, my teacher shared that all matter vibrates —meaning a hidden rhythm is literally everywhere and is everything. From the fabric of the universe to the structure of our cells, all life oscillates in sine wave patterns of push and pull, negotiating balance between flow and resistance. As I reach to understand this balance between forces in nature, I am drawn to the edges of the boundaries. The South Asian Sanskrit origin of my name, ‘Seema’, translates to the word “boundary” serving as a conceptual cornerstone for my work as I delve into the scientific nature of boundaries, not as hard barriers, but as evidence of an exchange and relationship between at least two elements. I explore boundaries between the built and natural worlds, the interplay between negative and positive space, and the push-and-pull exchange of wave forms (sound and matter) creating and artistic aesthetic of biomorphic curved organic shapes organized in fractal biological rhythmic patterns. My Tabla Sculpture Series seeks to visualize this unseen rhythm. The works are made from reclaimed tabla drumheads each played and touched by musicians for hundreds of hours until the leather is worn and no longer usable. With their circular shape and dark central shai, these forms already resemble biological cells with nuclei or black hole cosmic centers of vibrational architecture.
