Drawing from a vast and meticulously generated colour palette for Peenya, Aroushka Jinelle D’mello brings a selection of these colours into the station through a large scale installation of modular columns suspended along the stairs, with the colours shifting and changing as one moves across it. The piece forges a subtle and ephemeral link between the metro station and its community by reflecting the diversity of the local visual palette.
Aroushka D’mello entered the field with an interest in fine-art, working primarily with her preferred medium of watercolours. Since then, she has worked with illustration, typography and graphic design, occasionally trying her hand at curating, exhibition design, muraling, film & animation. Photography forms a big part of her practice as well, and she also engages in social media design, advertising and food reviewing. In her work, she looks for opportunities to bring several of these fields together to create a wholesome experience for her audience.
Her first impressions of Peenya were influenced by its predominantly dull and dusty colour palette, and her ideas during the first semester revolved around bringing colour into the metro station to contrast its stark atmosphere. However, as she delved deeper into her research, using photography as a tool, she started noticing how diverse Peenya’s colour palette truly was, with colourfully painted Vaastu houses to the women’s sari blouses to the bright blue vegetable carts. Her final set of colours were consolidated and edited from the thirty palettes she’d compiled from her photographs. She chose to use painted PVC pipes as her material, suspending them in four rows and painting them with bands of colour.