A zest for the palimpsest
This week, we welcome Tesia T. Singh-Ragen. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Oregon, India and New York City, she now lives in New York and works in paint, drawing, textiles and collage.
Tesia’s practice explores the intersections between people and nature along two parallel channels. One is personal and introspective, aimed at reaching a state where intuition leads and meditation becomes possible. The other draws on her background in environmental studies: built from site visits and textural swatches of landscapes, it explores how memories and identities bind to specific places.
Tesia was selected as a 2026 artist in residence at Estudio Arriba Abajo in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, and as an Acedia Studios Spotlight Artist. She is also a decorative painter specializing in gilding, stencil work, handmade wallpapers and window displays.
In her artist statement, she writes:
“With a diasporic childhood that led me through drastically different cultures, climates, and neighborhoods, I sought grounding in the continuity between places. This often manifested as an affinity for the natural world, where language and race were not barriers to connection. My eyes eventually became trained to see the similar signs of life, both human and otherwise, that are embedded in the land regardless of its location.
“These days, the landscapes I paint are blends of the places I’ve lived in or visited, where I have loved ones, and where I can imagine being. Figures appear to embody my questions of how to be rooted within ever-shifting environments. My color palettes and texture choices reflect a regular practice of walking and photographing surfaces, often looking for evidence of the cycles of decay, repair and reinvention. I enjoy studying change in inanimate surfaces such as crumbling brick, just as much as I might in a backyard’s lawn over the course of a year’s seasons. I find comfort and motivation in the inevitability of change and the weathering of time, and aim to create paintings that depict the landscape as a site of unpredictability, yet also one tethered to tradition and memory.
“The paper I’m currently painting on is salvaged and has lived many lives before becoming the surface for my current body of work. Years of operating as a building super reveal themselves in my inclination to save and store materials ripe with potential to be reused and repurposed. My current practice starts with leftover house paint, and focuses on abstract landscapes built in thin layers of paint and collage. The first stage is largely improvisational. I work standing and move based on the sensory experience of creating sound and friction as I pull paint over paper. This first step is about staying connected to the creative impulse that emerges without overthinking or critique.
“The large initial papers are then sliced into many pieces, so that each smaller composition begins with an unexpected surface. I pick out shapes and textures and build abstract landscapes tailored to the time, location and research relevant to that series of work. In the end, I’m left with dissolving, colorful and abstract landscapes that nevertheless reflect snapshots of a recognizable place.”
