For Melbourne-based artist Abhijit Pal, imagination didn’t need toys. It just needed a corner. A quiet space where a shadow could become a kingdom, or a bedroom floor a busy hospital, all ruled by the boundless freedom of a child’s mind. This deep, personal world is the heart of his first Australian solo exhibition, My Elder Sister, opening in Melbourne on 15 January.
The show is a quiet homecoming of sorts. It centres on photographs of his family’s now-abandoned house in India, a place foundational to his early years. Last year, living far away in Melbourne, Pal felt a “quiet pull” to return.
“Distance creates clarity,” he tells The Indian Sun. “I sensed that it might soon disappear… I felt the need to see it again, to acknowledge where imagination first felt safe, generous, and limitless.”
What he found was not a ruin, but a transformation. Nature was gently reclaiming the spaces where he once played. “Walls fading, plants entering rooms, light and silence settling in,” he recalls. “It didn’t feel sad. It felt natural.” This peaceful acceptance of change set the emotional tone for the work that followed.
Pal’s practice uniquely blends photography with the slow, tactile tradition of Kantha embroidery. Onto these evocative images of empty rooms and overgrown courtyards, he stitches faint lines of text. They are not loud statements, but whispers—simple memories of the games and roles invented in those very spots.
“The words emerge naturally,” he explains, “like memories returning softly, without drama.” The embroidery, he finds, slows down the often-immediate nature of photography. “It allows me to sit with the image longer, to listen to it. The photograph becomes less about documentation and more about emotion and touch.”
Using Kantha, a tradition with a deep history of storytelling and repair, feels instinctively right to him. “It’s intimate and resilient,” Pal says. “It feels like a language that already understands how to hold memory gently.”
While the work touches on themes of change and the passage of time, Pal is clear that it is not an act of mourning. “It feels closest to preservation,” he says, “but more about the joy of revisiting. It’s a gentle holding. A way of saying: this mattered, and it still does.”
In today’s fast-paced, screen-filled world, the contrast to his childhood of unstructured play emerged naturally during his process. His work isn’t a rejection of modern life, but a reminder. “Another way of being once existed very easily,” he suggests, “and perhaps still does.”
Ultimately, Pal hopes viewers find their own memories in his quiet, stitched scenes. “I hope they recall a small moment, perhaps a sibling, a game, or a space that once held imagination,” he says. “Even a brief recognition is enough.”
My Elder Sister is an ongoing series, one Pal plans to expand with other spaces and memories. For now, it stands as a tender, resilient tribute to the places that shape us, and the limitless inner worlds they help build.
‘My Elder Sister’ by Abhijit Pal runs from 15 January to 14 March 2026 at Kingston Arts Centre, Moorabbin. For more details, click here.
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