Growing up in Kolkata, India, Purnaa completed her academic art qualifications in Printmaking at Rabindra Bharati University, India, after which she worked as an art and creative practice educator. She moved to Johannesburg in 2015 and a year later started an internship at David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, which refined her professional printmaking practice, and where she continues with her own printmaking work. Since 2017, she has worked as a part-time printmaking teacher at Artist Proof Studio, Johannesburg.
Purnaa looks at identity through the lens of the relationship between self and society, exploring the interface between the social, political, and personal. Her works are autobiographical in nature and she draws her imagery from her everyday life – both current and memories of the prosaic which profoundly impacted on her values and belief system and delineated her identity.
Printmaking since 2006, Purnaa mainly enjoys intaglio and relief techniques. She is fascinated by process of making marks and then transforming them onto another surface, relating this to imprinting her daily life's experience/memories into my thoughts, allowing the fragments to evolve.
INSTAGRAM @purnaa_deb
