Weight of me by Kirti Virmani

Artist Kirti Virmani recently debuted a site-specific installation at our Cleaver Street project space at Lambeth County Court, which was also supported by Plaintiff Press. Learn more about the exhibition and explore Kirti’s work here.

Artist Statement

I am an Indian-born visual artist based between London and India, working across photography, printmaking, and sculptural forms. My interdisciplinary practice centres around ideas of rebellion within and hope. What I observe through my photographic lens becomes the source material for what I construct and destruct through my print and sculpture practice to navigate, and reconfigure the existing gender narratives that we finds ourselves in. I am interested in unlayering the physical and emotional veils that have come to cloak feminine existence. Through my making process, I seek to unmake these layers, to unwrap and release essence, allowing it to surface and breathe. My practice reflects on the weight of the self and the weight we carry collectively, navigating the tensions between intimacy, inheritance, and holding space. I hold a Master’s in Print from the Royal College of Art and have exhibited my works in both the UK and India.

About the installation in her own words

‘weight of me’ is a site-specific installation housed in the now decommissioned Lambeth County Court. The work explores themes of identity, home and holding space. In my thousand walled home, reside the thousand voices that preceded me.

In my thousand walled home, I am free to be in and out. I am free to close and to open. In my thousand walled home, voices echo and surround.

What does it mean to inhabit a space, to break the walls down and build again? To build how you want to. This work considers the relationship between containment and freedom, between the structures we inherit and those we create for ourselves. It asks what happens when walls become permeable: when private thoughts, memories, and desires move beyond the boundaries that hold them. At the centre of the installation are voices drawn from journals written by women. Over the years, I have collected these writings: some found, some shared willingly, all entrusted to the archive of lived experience. They speak across generations, carrying desires, doubts, observations, and acts of resistance.

For me, these journals have become a kind of scripture. They are texts I return to for guidance and reflection. They inform my understanding of womanhood, inheritance, and self. They encourage me to question, dismantle, and reconstruct the gendered narratives that shape our lives.

To write is to speak into a wall. To keep a journal is to create a room of one’s own. Within its pages, wishes can be confessed, fears named, futures imagined. The act of writing becomes an act of freedom.

Weight of Me is an invitation to listen and be held, to the voices that came before us, to the architectures we inhabit, and to the possibility of rebuilding ourselves on our own terms.

About the Artist Book: Weight of me
Edition of 200 | Produced at Plaintiff Press

Parallel to the site-specific installation at Lambeth County Court, the artist book weight of me translates the concept of the “thousand-walled home” into a tactile, intimate object. Comprising a set of five envelopes, the publication exists as an independent artwork that extends the project’s exploration of journal archiving and what it means to carry the weight of many voices.

Just as private thoughts are folded into letters, we are folded into the architectures of our families, histories, and inherited ways of being. Within this work, the envelopes themselves become homes: fragile architectures containing the whispers, breaths, and silences of the women who came before us.

While the installation invites visitors to move through a physical space, the book invites readers to physically unfold and inhabit the archive. Moving from the heavy, inherited weight of maternal histories to the open potential of an empty journal wrapped in red, weight of me is an invitation to add your own weight, speak into the wall, and begin building your own thousand-walled home.

Each edition includes a text from the artist alongside a journal excerpt from the archives.

“The weight of me is the weight of all women
that have preceded me
mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters…
The weight of me is that of a holy book
wrapped in red on the mantle of our 4 walled home.
The weight of me now is an empty journal,
wrapped in red, for me to write my own story,
to add my own weight.
To build my 1000 walled home”

Text by Kirti Virmani

 

To find out more about Kirti’s work click here for her website and instagram