Afro Caribbean (Kittian) and Indian multidisciplinary artist Geetha Satish intimately knows loss. She lost both of her parents and faces an autoimmune disease that has forced her to reckon with her health. And through it all, art has been a lifeline. “Art has truly been my sanity,” she tells me.
Geetha is bipolar, and she experiences mania. There are chunks of time where she struggles to get out of bed, and other times when she cannot do anything but create. During periods of mania, she says, the art pours out of her. Geetha moves across mediums in a deliberate way to stay regulated. She sculpts bags out of clay and ceramics, shoots photography centred on identity, and builds worlds through visual design. Each practice, distinct on the surface, is rooted in the same impulse to survive and heal despite the cards that she has been dealt.
“My art was the only constant in my inconsistent life,” she says. Every apartment, every chapter, every difficult season, she made her environment a reflection of her inner world, decorating her walls with her own work because creating it was how she survived. Her mother, a creative soul who loved fashion and photography, planted that seed early. Her father, she later discovered, could draw too. The artistry was always in her blood, even when she was still learning to claim it.
As a mixed-race woman, Indian and Black, she has known what it feels like to be told you are not enough of one thing to belong. When her sister travelled to India and was asked to introduce herself as a family friend rather than her father’s daughter, the wound of that rejection became the very thing Geetha has continued to transmute through her lens. “I am an Indian woman, whether my family accepted me or not, and that is something no one can take away from me.”
Then there are the ceramic bag sculptures with smiley faces, her most beloved work, she began making after losing her mother. She wanted to make her mother proud. She decided the proudest she could make her was to be happy herself. The bags became that symbol, something whimsical and free, dedicated to her mother’s love and to the ongoing pursuit of joy as a radical act.
Geetha has channelled every difficult season, manic episode, and every creative breakthrough into launching Alt + Space Media, her own design and media agency. It is the fullest expression yet of an artist who uses art as medicine. Some people may see cool art. For Geetha Satish, every piece holds a complex story of healing. She wants to celebrate life, and everything she creates is proof that she is doing exactly that. Some people will look at her work and see cool art. But with everything she creates, lives a larger story about a vitality against all odds.
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