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Lyla Normand

For 17 years I’ve spent my life floating between cultures, never feeling a part of one. As a Pakistani-American raised mostly in Thailand I've done  a lot of cultural exploration and my sustained investigation is similarly culturally experimental. In my investigation, I focus on the substance of water from a multicultural perspective. I was interested in the numerous ways this universally necessary resource has been interpreted in various mythology and folklore, paying special attention to universal similarities and regional differences across cultural representations. In response my work depicts entities and practices from a wide breadth of countries like the Thai Loi Krathong festival (image 4), Irish Selkies (image 5), and Greek Sirens (image 2), among others. I extended my cultural investigation further by emulating traditional cultural styles in my art, such as Sumi-e for the Japanese-inspired images 8 and 9, and moving to a digital medium in images 12 and 13 to capture a specific analogous color palette and tone. From my exploration I've discovered that across almost every culture, water and similar substances like ice are represented as beautiful, curious, and deadly.

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