Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1957, Thailand) is an artist, writer, and semi-retired Professor at Chiang Mai University, where she established the pioneering Multidisciplinary Arts programme. She holds a BFA and an MFA in graphic arts from Silpakorn University, Bangkok (1986), and a diploma and MA from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Germany (1990, 1994). This print was produced during Araya’s first period of study in Germany (1988-1990), and was exhibited in small solo exhibitions in Germany, and then in her major solo exhibition at Bangkok’s National Art Gallery in 1992, titled Stories in Rooms. It is a fine representative example of her abstract and semi-abstract printmaking practice of this period. The art historian John Clark notes that “Araya’s prints are of a very high technical order married to a forceful series of expressed emotional ambiguities, which give her work a palpable sense of the uncanny, even dread.” The artist first came to prominence for her printmaking, winning several prestigious prizes for graphic works in Thailand during the 1980s and early 1990s. Bodily forms in the work – perhaps living, perhaps deceased – hint at the possibility of narrative in this print; a potential further underscored in the title of the solo exhibition in which it was presented to a Thai audience for the first time. Writing in the catalogue for Stories in Rooms, the American artist Joan Grounds captures Araya’s sensibility: “The good girl tells me tales from her childhood.The bad girl allows herself to speak of darkness.The sad girl tells the sorrows of fading memory. […]The clever girl uses her students’ old plates to create a work uniquely her own.”
