Desmond Lazaro and his collaborator, Christopher Tisdell, have kindly provided the following outline for their body of work presented in Significant Form.

Authors/Creators:

LAZARO, Desmond; TISDELL, Christopher (School of Mathematics and Statistics, UNSW, Sydney, AUSTRALIA).

Abstract:

The exhibition will present a tightly curated survey of artists from the region, bringing together established modern figures with emerging contemporary names. Through a diverse range of mediums, techniques, and visual idioms, these artworks will exemplify the diversity of output across South Asia and will explore how artists have pushed their materials to new heights unrivalled elsewhere around the globe. Significant Form will be centered on works of abstraction, motivated by a desire to showcase the rich influences that have provoked new, personal visual idioms not simply conjured through formal analyses, but infused with memory, conviction, and a refusal to resolve the competing demands of modernity and tradition into easy synthesis. Working in the wake of post-Partition avant-garde painters’ schism with colonial methods, the exhibited works will exemplify how artists have absorbed and translated the region’s rich visual inheritance –calligraphy, architectural geometry, textile patterns, cosmology – into modernist forms. Here, abstraction becomes encoded with meaning, a method of registering the complexity of experience and identity freed from the limitations of direct representation.A second current running through the exhibition concerns the material culture of South Asia as both subject and method. Artists in the region have not merely depicted craft traditions or appropriated their techniques. Rather, their focus on diverse mediums – printmaking, ceramics, collage, photography, as well as painting – have been reconstituted as a means to connect with past traditions and emphasize cultural continuums. Such instances of versatility speaks to the enduring renewal of South Asian art, catalyzed by the complex cultural, political, and material histories that have generated a constantly evolving yet cohesive intergenerational landscape. Taken together, the exhibition resists any singular account of South Asian modernism, insisting instead on its plurality and its continuing evolution in the hands of artists working today. Here, it becomes clear how the region’s multiplicity of histories, cultures, ethnicities, languages, and visual registers has incubated an extraordinary range of aesthetic vocabularies that emphasise the necessity of a transnational art historical perspective.

Research Statement:

Research Background: Kurma (Turtle Fire Altar) emerges from an interdisciplinary investigation of Vedic mythology, mathematics, architecture and ritual practice. It focuses on the turtle-shaped fire altar of the ancient Śulba Sūtra tradition and its relationship to Kurma, the cosmic turtle who supports the churning of the ocean in the Samudra Manthan. The Śulba Sūtras preserve sophisticated geometrical procedures for constructing and transforming ritual altars while conserving area, yet aspects of their dimensions, proportions and practical construction remain implicit or unresolved. The work asks how creative practice, informed by mathematical reconstruction, can recover and reinterpret this embodied geometrical knowledge.

Research Contribution: Developed through an ongoing collaboration between artist Desmond Lazaro and mathematician Professor Chris Tisdell (UNSW), the work brings mathematical analysis into the processes of artistic and historical reconstruction. Investigation of brick dimensions, altar layouts, proportional systems and geometric transformations provides a new basis for reconstructing the turtle altar and exploring connections between Vedic geometry, architecture, cosmology and mythology. The resulting artwork treats ancient mathematical knowledge not simply as historical content, but as a generative methodology for contemporary abstraction and material practice.

Research Significance: The work was selected for Significant Form: Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art, curated by Adeline Ooi at Art Intelligence Global, Hong Kong (20 September–11 December 2026). Its presentation within this international curated survey situates the research alongside modern and contemporary South Asian practices engaging architectural geometry, cosmology, material traditions and the continuing relationship between modernity and cultural inheritance.

Medium:  Painting and Sculpture