Previewing the materials for The Quiet Never Lies Empty, Saanthia Bulchandani’s first solo exhibition opening at Akara Contemporary this week, I expected drawings of interiors. Bedrooms, living rooms, the furniture of daily life. Instead, the images suggest rooms that keep shifting the longer one spends with them. A woman sits on a sofa reading while clouds gather above her. In another drawing, a tiger stretches across the top of an unmade bed. Elsewhere, a man sleeps as the animal leaps through the room toward him, as though emerging from the dream itself.
At first glance the works begin with recognisable domestic spaces. Yet the scenes gradually tilt into something more psychological. The interiors remain familiar, but their internal logic loosens.
Bulchandani’s figures tend to be caught in the middle of things. Someone reading. Someone resting on a bed. Someone waiting beside another person yet appearing entirely elsewhere in thought. They rarely meet the viewer’s gaze, which keeps the scene slightly out of reach.
“The subjects in my work are often absorbed in their own reveries,” the artist says. “I draw them in moments of inertia, sleeping, reading, or waiting for something to happen. To me, these in-between moments make up the bulk of life.”
Those stretches of time appear to structure the drawings. Instead of dramatic action, the works settle into the pauses that fill daily existence. A book left open. A body stretched across a couch. A bedroom at the moment before sleep fully arrives.
Many of the interiors originate in places the artist knows well. Bedrooms she has lived in, homes belonging to friends, rooms shaped by everyday routines before the drawings begin to alter them.
“I usually draw spaces I’m familiar with, my home, my bed, or the homes of people close to me,” she says. “I’m interested in how domestic interiors can hold both comfort and confinement at the same time. That tension is central to my work.”
That tension builds gradually through the way the drawings are made. Bulchandani works almost entirely in pen and ink, a medium that demands careful preparation. Because the line cannot easily be revised, the image is constructed long before the final drawing begins. Ideas are sketched, subjects photographed, and compositions redrawn until the structure feels settled.
“Working with black ink creates a strong sense of permanence,” she explains. “Because ink offers little room for revision, I have to construct tonal variation through the pens themselves.”
Different pens produce different densities of line. Some are nearly spent, leaving softer marks across skin or fabric. Others create darker fields of ink that build the backgrounds around the figures. As the marks accumulate, the surfaces of the room begin to thicken with pattern.
“Repetitive mark-making also plays an important role,” Bulchandani says. “As patterns accumulate across surfaces, the room begins to feel as though it is closing in on the figure.”
Within these patterned interiors, unexpected elements begin to appear. A cloud settles above a couch. Stars hover within reach. Or a tiger emerges somewhere inside the room.
The tiger has become a recurring presence throughout this body of work. According to the artist, it first appeared in her dreams before gradually finding its way into the drawings.
“The tiger first appeared in my dreams, walking through cities,” Bulchandani says. “To me, the tiger embodies resilience and solitude. In these drawings it often functions as a guardian within the domestic space.”
Across the works described for the exhibition, the animal appears in different states. In one drawing it sleeps above a bed, as if protecting the sleeper below. In another it leaps toward a man suspended in sleep. Elsewhere the tiger rests quietly, echoing the stillness of the human figures nearby.
Some of the works also shift the surface of the drawing itself. Alongside works on paper, Bulchandani has begun drawing on plywood, allowing the grain of the material to guide the image.
“Drawing on wood was revelatory for me,” she says. “The ink spreads across the surface almost like velvet, forcing me to relinquish a degree of control and work with the material rather than against it.”
In these pieces the wood participates directly in the composition. The natural grain can resemble clouds or atmospheric texture, while certain areas remain untouched so that the material itself forms part of a face or body. The viewer’s eye begins to assemble the image from both drawing and surface.
Bulchandani’s relationship with drawing reaches back to childhood. She began drawing seriously at the age of twelve while recovering in medical isolation, using the practice to construct fictional worlds while tracking her recovery. Years later, during the pandemic, she returned to drawing with renewed discipline, developing a sustained routine that ultimately shaped the works now on view in this exhibition.
That history echoes through the themes of rest, waiting and reflection that run through the drawings. Many of the scenes appear to occupy the threshold between waking and dreaming, moments when interior life begins to expand across the room.
As The Quiet Never Lies Empty opens at Akara Contemporary, the drawings promise a sequence of interiors where everyday space becomes porous. Clouds drift indoors. Tigers move through bedrooms. Stars hover just above the furniture.
The rooms remain recognisable. Yet the longer one considers them, the more they begin to behave like dreams that happen to unfold inside a home.
What: The Quiet Never Lies Empty by Saanthia Bulchandani
When: March 13 – April 18, 2026
Where: Akara Contemporary
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