Biography

Ritu Arya is a visual artist based in Glasgow whose practice explores the subtle and complex ways unprocessed trauma manifests in daily life. Driven by human emotion, personal melancholia, and deep longing, her work transforms psychological tension into tangible form.

Working primarily in sculpture, Arya often incorporates text and imagery to expand narrative possibilities. Her works occupy a space between the organic and the abstract, guided by an abject sensibility that is both bodily and material-driven. Through this approach, she seeks to articulate the emotional residues that shape human experience.

Her current research examines the notion of the “art monster” and the deconstruction of patriarchal frameworks, alongside an analysis of trauma as a byproduct of high-context cultures and layered social hierarchies. Arya’s sculptures offer a space for shared, often unspoken experiences to take form – where vulnerability, memory, and material converge.

She has exhibited in Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cologne, Moscow, Glasgow, and Dundee [UK], and her work has been recognised with the Bragi Award for Visual Arts (Fringe 2025), the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival In/Visible Commission (2024), and the Gilbert Bayes Charitable Trust Grant (2023).

Alongside her sculptural practice, Arya also makes functional pottery and collaborates with her mother on a range of handmade crochet products, creating work intended for sale and everyday use. This strand of her creative life exists in deliberate contrast to the darker psychological terrain of her studio practice. Where her sculptures investigate trauma, absence, and emotional complexity, her pottery and crochet work embrace warmth, ornament, utility, and accessibility. Together, these parallel practices form a kind of yin and yang: one inward-looking and confronting difficult realities, the other outward-facing and connective.