maya mackrandilal

I work across performance, sculpture, video, writing, and ritual to investigate how personal and collective histories are held in the body — and how they might be transformed.

My practice emerges from lived experience, ancestral memory, and political rupture. Through embodied gestures, mythic archetypes, and speculative cosmologies, I explore themes of birth and destruction, care and collapse, devotion and dissent. I am drawn to moments where the intimate and the systemic collide: the maternal body as a site of labor and prophecy, grief as a portal, ritual as both survival strategy and imaginative technology.

My work moves fluidly between mediums, without a fixed point of origin. A performance may become a video, a collage may lead to a sculpture, a text may generate an image — each form carrying traces of the others. Rather than developing linearly, the work unfolds in a spiral, returning, reconfiguring, and expanding over time. Like a flower opening, ideas emerge through repetition and variation, allowing meaning to deepen as it shifts across material, scale, and context.

My work is informed by diasporic identity, feminist and decolonial thought, and spiritual lineages that resist linear time. Rather than offering answers, I create spaces for encounter — places where viewers are invited to slow down, feel, and reckon with what is unresolved. I believe art can hold complexity without collapsing it, and that beauty and terror often arrive together.

This website is an evolving archive of performances, visual works, writings, and experiments. I invite you to move through it intuitively: to follow images, linger with texts, and trace the threads that connect body, land, memory, and future possibility.

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Image: Performance Still from I Inherit the Water: Initiation a public performance/ritual at Kali Ghat in Patna, Bihar, India November 8, 2025