People, Places, & Things : Cravings | Sarranya Chandrasekaran | Between Sips of Chai

Sarranya Chandrasekaran

Between Sips of Chai

14"x11, mixed media, acrylics on panel

A mixed-media painting of two figures at a tea counter, with a glass tumbler and serving vessels nearby. Collaged ephemera and fabric layered with acrylic create a quiet scene focused on the pause and exchange that happen around chai.

Artist Statement

A tea/chai stall is a daily stage: chai poured in practiced rhythm, candid chatter as backdrop, tea runner waltzing with steaming tea glasses. The craving for chai becomes habit, stirs memory, fuels imagination, and shapes identity through belonging and more.

Saranya Chandrasekaran is an interdisciplinary artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her artistic practice is motivated by the interplay of nature, science, memories, and identity. With a background in engineering, she is drawn to combining traditional and experimental techniques—often working through layering, transfer, and mark-making to build surfaces that feel both intuitive and investigated.

Across painting, collage, and mixed media, Saranya uses materials and process to echo how meaning accumulates over time: patterns repeat, fragments shift, and traces remain. Her work moves between abstraction and suggestion, inviting viewers to sense connections between the personal and the ecological—between lived experience and the larger systems that shape it.

Saranya hopes her works kindle a spark of curiosity, inviting viewers to pause and reflect on the beauty, subtleties, and complexity of the world around us.