Permindar Kaur

Permindar Kaur was born in Nottingham in the 1960s, but also has family roots in Glasgow, Scotland. She is a sculptor who formerly gained attention in the British Black Arts Movement but came to prominence in the 1990s as part of the so-called YBA group, or Young British Artists, alongside figures like Damien Hirst who were experimenting with contemporary art techniques. Kaur studied for her undergraduate fine arts degree at Sheffield City Polytechnic between 1986 and 1989, and completed her master's in fine art at the Glasgow School of Art in 1992. She has spent periods of time outside of the UK, in Canada, Barcelona and Sweden, which has impacted her work significantly. After a ten-year break in the middle of her career, during which she removed herself entirely from the art world, she has returned with fresh perspectives.

A dominant aspect of her work is the way it invokes home and family but also feelings of insecurity and the uncanny. Her work is made nostalgic for most viewers through the repeated use of children's toys, furniture and clothing, but it also prompts discomfort as these forms construct underlying narratives about loss, displacement and vulnerability. Sometimes her work is interpreted as a commentary on immigration, war and the legacies of colonialism. Her own background as a second-generation migrant, and her South Asian and Sikh heritage do clearly inform her work, but she has been outspoken in the past about issues with conflating an artist’s work with parts of their cultural identity, such as ‘Blackness’. For Kaur, an artist’s work should be appreciated on its own terms.

Her time in Barcelona, Spain influenced her practice in profound ways; she began to question how she was being identified in public and in the press, and the lack of control she felt over this. She felt more creative freedom in Spain, where she was not being associated with her Indian background. Exhibiting her work Innocence, which consists of a Sikh child’s orange dress (orange is sacred in the Sikh culture) alongside a Sikh kirpan (knife), did not elicit the response Kaur was expecting. She felt that her work was able to carry multiple meanings for her audiences that did not centre reductively upon her upbringing.

In 2024 she exhibited her show Nothing is Fixed at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and she is exploring how art can be ‘co-created’ with members of the public as a way of encouraging community engagement with art and sculpture.