Paula Bansal
Paula Bansal’s work explores the delicate interplay between memory, material and transformation. Her practice often begins with familiar, everyday substances — pigments, textiles, organic matter — which she manipulates through processes of layering, staining, burning or erosion. These gestures create surfaces that feel both intimate and elemental, echoing the slow shifts of time, weather and human touch.
Her compositions hover between abstraction and trace. Marks appear and disappear, colours seep into one another, and forms emerge as if from a half‑remembered landscape. This sense of quiet metamorphosis invites the viewer to look closely, to follow the subtle transitions that unfold across each piece. Bansal’s work is less about depicting the world than about revealing the emotional and material residues it leaves behind.
At the heart of her practice is a fascination with impermanence — how things change, fade, accumulate and endure. Her pieces often feel like fragments of a larger story, shaped by forces both intentional and accidental. Through this delicate balance, Bansal creates a visual language that speaks to the fragility of experience and the beauty found in states of becoming.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
Solo Exhibition, The Old Print Works, Birmingham, UK, 2023 Material Echoes, Midlands Art Centre (MAC), Birmingham, UK, 2022 Surface / Memory, Stryx Gallery, Birmingham, UK, 2021 Emerging Voices, RBSA Gallery, Birmingham, UK, 2020
AWARDS:
Selected Artist, Midlands Open, Leicester Contemporary, 2023 Highly Commended, RBSA Prize Exhibition, Birmingham, 2022 Winner, Emerging Artist Bursary, West Midlands Arts Fund, 2021 Shortlisted, Visual Arts Open, UK, 2020
EDUCATION:
MA Fine Art, Birmingham School of Art, Birmingham City University, 2020 BA (Hons) Art & Design, Coventry University, 2017 Foundation Diploma in Art & Design, Hereford College of Arts, 2014
Paula Bansal lives and works in Birmingham.
“My work grows from a fascination with how materials hold memory. I am drawn to surfaces that have lived a little - stained, worn, weathered - and I use processes that allow those histories to remain visible. Each piece becomes a conversation between intention and accident, between what I choose to reveal and what the material insists on keeping”
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