Maya Patel

I'm a visual artist based in Durban, exploring the intersections of identity, memory, and materiality. My work is a conversation—between pigment and paper, between the personal and the universal, between who I am and who I'm becoming.

I work primarily with watercolor, oil paint, and found materials. Each medium offers a different language: watercolor for its unpredictability, oil for its depth and endurance, mixed media for its ability to hold fragments of the world around me. Together, they allow me to build pieces that feel honest, textured, and alive.

My current focus is on how color and texture can express emotional states that words can't reach. I'm drawn to contrasts—soft and sharp, fluid and fixed, vibrant and muted—because identity itself is rarely one thing. It's layered. Contradictory. Always in motion.