People, Places, & Things : Cravings | Sarranya Chandrasekaran | Chaiwala

Sarranya Chandrasekaran

Chaiwala

14"x11, mixed media, acrylics on panel

A mixed-media painting of a chai vendor and a cluster of glass tumblers and vessels. Layered ephemera, fabric, and acrylic build a dense surface where repeated cup outlines and quick marks suggest the rhythm of pouring, serving, and returning.

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.