Gaurav Singh

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Tahireh Lal is an Indian artist whose work explores the interplay between movement and stasis. She draws on local contexts and materials to work through themes of time and home, in video, installation, and sculpture. In her masterclass, Mapping Our Lives, she asked us to make a piece about our own lives from a set of given materials.

She opened with a demonstration: she mapped her own life through a series of lemonade shots, each with a distinct flavour tied to a memory of a particular place or time. As we sipped, she told the stories behind them. It set the tone for the rest of the workshop, that personal reflection is the material you work from.

The brief was hard in a good way. The fixed set of materials and the time limit forced us to think sideways, and Tahireh's job was to keep us experimenting rather than settling. She kept coming back to two things: have a strong idea, and execute it well. A strong concept, she showed, comes through in how you use the materials, and it gets sharper with honest feedback. By having us share our work and critique each other, she made the room a place where everyone learned from everyone else.

What stayed with me was the question her lemonade demonstration raised: how much of memory is sensory, and how strongly a taste or a smell can pull a whole time of your life back. The workshop was a good reminder that reflection and a bit of experiment, executed carefully, can turn your own experience into something worth making.