Oliva Saha
B.
1998
With Quiet Art Movement since
July 2025
"
The story still unfolding
"

_Oliva's work grows from lived moments, where dried flowers, toys, insects, and stains stand in for different chapters of womanhood. Moving between girlhood and adulthood, it plays with shyness, desire, fantasy, anxiety, and the impulse to look away—and then look again._ _Images are allowed to misbehave on paper: washed, stained, erased, layered. Tea, flowers, indigo, and alta seep in like memories that refuse to settle. Some things are concealed, some amplified, some left unresolved._ _Part diary, part daydream, her practice unfolds as an ongoing autobiography—tracking the small, strange, tender negotiations of growing up female in a middle-class world._
Artist Statement
My work is inspired by my life journey, many objects in my works represent different phases of my womanhood. As a girl, I wanted to reexamine my childhood and parallelly showing adulthood as I grow up at times shying away from the reality and complexities of life, sexual fantasy, anxiety, self obsession, this escape emerges in gradual chapters in my art work. A flower's life ends when it wilts, but the journey from bud to full-bloomed flower shows the fulfilment of the cycle of life. I try to capture this fulfilment in my work. I am playing with various forms that emerge out of studies in drawing objects organising around me like dry flower, caterpillar, grasshopper, teddy bear, fish, millipedes, social element which surrounding me. I speak about my experiences of growing up experimenting with paper, making surface as a material dying, staining as methods. I use watercolours, tea stain, flower colour, Alta dye, Indigo etc. Creating some patches, figuring out, then washing, painting, and drawing with bold and fine brush lines. Some erasing and adding something which is clearly shown, overlapping that makes a layer. Try to hide or focusing something like Sexuality, fantasy, self-obsession, and memory through these processes. My works also speak of traditions that I have seen being lost with time, in my childhood I saw my mother, grandmother, and other women wearing Alta, a red liquid, traditionally used in Eastern India for adornment of their feet. That tradition has diminished, but it has not faded completely. This emerges in my works as a reminiscence of my childhood. I depict myself in my artwork in the form of its emotion and existence and my memories fuel them. They are visual images of my conversations with myself. I see my work as an autobiography where I want to make day to day documentation as a journal that reflects the life of the girls who grew up like me in a middle-class family.
artworks
A mysterious meeting
Jan 2026
Natural pigment, gouache colour, drawing, golden foil, khariya on canson paper.
A beautiful home
Jan 2026
Natural pigment, gouache colour, watercolour, drawing, colour pencil, khariya on Canson paper.
22''/30''
A beautiful house
Jan 2026
Natural pigment, gouache colour, watercolour, drawing, colour pencil, khariya on canson paper.
A mysterious meeting
Jan 2026
Water colour, gouache colour, Natural pigment, drawing, golden foil, khariya on Canson (acid-free) paper.
22''/30''
A sweet memory
Jan 2026
Natural pigment, Flower colour, gouache colour, watercolour, pencil, Lokta paper pasted on Canson paper.
22''/30''
Can you see yourself?
Jan 2026
gouache colour, natural colour, tea stain on rice paper pasted on Fabiano
11 x 31 inches.
Dugga Dugga
Jan 2026
Natural pigment, gouache colour, drawing, colour pencil, khariya on canson paper.
DUGGA DUGGA
Jan 2026
Natural pigment, gouache colour, pen ink, golden and silver foil, khariya on handmade traditional surface.
22''/42''
Dystopia
Jan 2026
watercolour, Alta dye, tea stain, charcoal on paper
Endless education
Jan 2026
Natural pigment, gouache colour, watercolour, drawing, colour pencil, khariya on canson paper.






