ART & HEALING
The body remembers. Art gives it a language.
Long before I became a psychotherapist, art was one of the ways I understood inner life — what the body knows, what language conceals, and what emerges when an experience cannot yet be spoken. My practice moves between visual art, performance, theatre, movement and the body, exploring sexuality, trauma, gender, desire, shame and the sacred. Over the years, these inquiries have travelled through galleries, classrooms, therapeutic spaces and eventually into the development of Sacred Resilience®.
THE BODY AS ARCHIVE
The body carries stories. Some are inherited. Some are cultural. Some belong to pleasure. Others belong to violence, shame, longing, contradiction and survival.
My work has often begun at precisely this threshold:
what happens when something lived in the body cannot be adequately explained through words?
Painting becomes gesture.
Movement becomes memory. Performance allows contradiction to exist without immediately resolving it.
An object can become a place to locate sensation, grief or desire. Rather than using art simply to represent an experience, I am interested in what happens when we allow the act of making itself to become part of the inquiry.
SELECTED BODIES OF WORK
For me, art and healing have never been separate practices.
Womb Scripts
An exploration of the stories written onto the female body — sexuality, reproduction, inheritance, pleasure, violence and belonging.
Enter Womb Scripts →
I Can’t be Both
What happens when the categories we use to understand sexual violence become insufficient?
This body of work emerged from an inquiry into the unsettling possibility of survivorhood and perpetration existing within the same human being — and the psychological, bodily and cultural contradictions we would often rather keep separate.
Enter I Can’t Be Both →
Emotionality & the Self
Studies in interiority, affect and the changing relationship between emotion and identity. A visual inquiry into what we contain, what spills out, and what becomes visible when feeling is allowed form.
Enter Emotionality & the Self →
Experiments with the analogue
Material. Texture. Repetition. Slowness. Experiments in returning psychological experience to the hand, the object and the physical world.
Enter → Experiments with the analogue
PERFORMANCE, THEATRE & THE MOVING BODY
My training and practice in theatre expanded the canvas beyond the image. Performance allowed me to work with the body itself — its gestures, absurdities, social conditioning, sexuality and contradictions.
In works such as Sad Girls Club, humour and performance became ways of examining gender, feminism and the identities we learn to perform for one another. The body was no longer simply the subject of the work.
It became the medium.
My background in theatre deepens this exploration, bringing movement, embodiment and performance into my creative practice. By moving between painting and the body, I create multi-sensory experiences that explore sexuality as a rich, layered and deeply personal terrain. My work invites a reconciliation with all parts of the self, creating space for transformation beyond trauma, shame and stigma.
A Comic Take on a Pseudo-Feminist Reality TV Show Panel,
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
FROM ART PRACTICE TO HEALING PRACTICE
Galleries & Shows that Neha’s work has been shown in:
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS & SHOWINGS
Art of Connection, Sullivan Galleries,
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Sad Girls Club Group Show, Defb8llator Gallery, Chicago
Ways of Seeing, Delhi Art Gallery
Mumbai
Interarts Showcase, University of Michigan
Ann Arbor
K.R. Market Stories, Gallery Samuha
Bengaluru
The Vulva and Me
Fabric attachment objects designed for grounding, breath guidance during triggers, and pleasure exploration
Healing from Sexual Assault – Group Show
“I Can’t be Both”
The duality of being a survivor and perpetrator of sexual violence in one body.
Art-making and psychological work as belonging to different parts of my life. Both ask us to become intimate with what is present. Both require curiosity toward what we would rather avoid. Both make room for contradiction. And sometimes, before we can explain what happened to us — or even know what comes next — we make something.