Between Silences
Prisha Goyal (2004) is a deaf artist whose practice centres on silence - not as a void, but as something embodied and embraced. Silence has shaped her perception since childhood, forming a particular way of reading space that runs through everything she creates.
Silence is not uniform. It is variable - shaped by the body, the environment, and the conditions through which it is perceived. No single definition holds.
She works with paper, fabric, light, shadow, and collage. Through folding, tearing, layering, and suspending, she builds structures that remain open and responsive - shaped by pauses, gaps, and intervals. Light and shadow quietly orient the body and shift spatial awareness.
Her installations are not images to be viewed from a distance, but situations to move within. You enter. The space does not explain itself. You do not look at the work. You move through it. They create conditions where attention recalibrates and the body becomes more aware of itself - as if it becomes the ear, listening differently.
Over four years of artistic research, this understanding shifted from a desire to represent her experience of deafness, toward something more embodied. Prisha works from the in-between space of the silence she inhabits and the silence others encounter. The threshold between lived silence and discovered silence is where her work begins.
What emerges is not a definition - but a range of experiences that remain partial and personal. And in that partiality, something can still be shared. Even in what seems like absence, something persists. Something reaches.
