Chudamani Clowes’s work is inspired by a childhood memory of playing with an elephant skull. She managed to link this memory with the Empire shows that took place last century when elephant troops were brought over from Ceylon, all the way to London to perform in front of an audience. She is interested in post-colonial discourse, in particular addressing the use of the ethnographic archive at the British Museum in contemporary art today. Clowes uses relief printing, etching and ceramics to create images and sculptures of fictional characters who are inspired by Victorian paintings. Chudamani Clowes is inspired by Victorian paintings like ‘The Last of England’ by Ford Maddox Brown. She has remodeled the one hundred characters from the painting by William Frith ‘The Day at the Races’. She is interested in how the non-European has been shown in museums. She is reinterpreting the artefacts from her own family’s colonial past, and using the medium of print and ceramics to create her own narrative of what may have happened in the past. As a post-colonial subject, she is reclaiming objects from her family history to carry out a translation. She is creating her own historical past dealing with issues of immigration and race encountered today.
