We recently connected with Seema Lisa Pandya and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Seema Lisa thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

I am a creative on a journey walking with one foot in the arts and the other in sustainability and green building. At this point in life, the goal is building towards the merger of these two paths. The beginning of my journey starts with the influence of my parents. My mother is an artist and my father is an engineer. Their influence on me represents a balance I see as my right and left brained activity as my artistic needs contains both the free form expression and critical planning and construction for spatial solutions. In terms of career path, I had originally wanted to formally study and pursue visual art in college, but was dissuaded by my South Asian parents and encouraged to follow a more practical and predictable career path and keep the visual art on the side as a hobby. “Artists starve” is what my father kept telling me. So I studied Interior design and sustainable building in college and made a great rewarding career out of it as sustainability consultant and as a college professor. I kept pursuing art and was involved in building creative communities, but the itch to create on a more professional level kept growing in a way that I could not ignore any longer. I saw others in my creative circle growing by leaps and bounds spending time on their creative process and was inspired to take a leap. About 8 years ago, I left my comfortable and rewarding job working for a sustainability consulting company to make room to explore my creative process and see what work came from it. I still have consulting jobs to help pay the bills, but my teaching and consulting schedule is my own and I have much more flexibility and time to pursue art. Over the last 8 years. I have created a handful of public sculpture pieces, kinetic art, many painting and sculptures. I have shown my work in galleries, museums, and had work featured in Vogue, Fine Woodworking magazine and more. Had I stared a more dedicated art practice sooner, I certainly would be farther in my artistic practice, but I may have also missed out on the amazing opportunities to understand the technical aspects of green design and gaining experience teaching that also influence my artwork. I think that everyone has a journey and the path to it is not always so clear cut. At this point, I would not change much of the past if I could. What is in my control now is what I do with the future.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a Brooklyn based multidisciplinary artist, accomplished sustainability consultant, and green building educator who explores the intersection between sustainability, art, culture, and the built-environment with an aim of connecting audiences with an experiential awareness of nature and primordial forms. My work ranges from fine art, public art, sculpture, painting, video animation, wood-working, kinetic interactive sculptures, and building integrated installations; as well as, sustainability consulting, and green building certification coordination- LEED, Living Building Challenge, and WELL. I also teach and have taught graduate and undergraduate courses in sustainable building at NYC’s FIT SUNY and currently at the New York School of Interior Design. As a self-taught fine artist and sustainability building consultant, I bring a unique perspective offering creative out of the box sustainability solutions to green building, and also bringing a natural science based aesthetic influence to my fine artwork.

One of my current fine art series, the Tabla Sculpture Series, probably best embodies many of the values and principals I explore as an artist. The sculptures are made from discarded ‘tabla’ drumheads. The tabla is a classical South Asian/ Indian percussion instrument and helps me reconnect to my cultural heritage. As far as I know, I am the only professional contemporary artist using this as a primary sculptural material. What I love about this unique materials is that each drumhead has been touched rhythmically by musicians for at least a thousand hours and now is embodied with energetic intention. As used items, I bring new life to what otherwise has no use to others and would have ended up in the trash. Their signature black spot integrated into the drum makes the drumheads appear to be biological cells and is my inspiration for sculpting them into forms that represent natural rhythm and biology.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

As a creative, I NEED to create. It is not necessarily a choice or a hobby but something essential to my well-being and a drive to manifest the various interconnections I experience in life. I may have tried to ignore it in the past to follow a more “traditional” professional path that was expected of me by my family, but this was a futile effort as my creative passions never could be suppressed. Making art is a journey in so many ways. Most artists struggle with self-worth as we exist in many ways outside of the consumer driven capitalistic built society and yet still have to operate in these constructs for survival. Part of the journey is overcoming those external pressures and let your “freak flag” shine! The rest of the creative journey for me is seeing where the art takes me. I have a sense of my path that the next phase will involve merging the sustainable building knowledge and fine art more into the public art realm, but the ways in which that will come about and manifest are also a mystery to me. The mystery is what keeps making art exciting to me and help me be open to possibilities

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Many years ago when I was still at my 9-5 sustainability job working for someone else, I ran across an article in the Guardian entitled “The art of sustainability: imagination, not spreadsheets will create change”. This hit the nail on the head for my mission and creative journey and encouraged me to step outside of the 9-5 construct and pursue my art. The driving message here is that our climate problems stem from a base root issue that we as a society are emotionally disconnected from nature and our natural selves. Art has the ability to provoke deep emotional and sometimes unexplainable experiences that can alter our lives and could be used to help reconnect us to nature.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.seemalisapandya.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seemalisapandya/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seemalisapandya/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seema-lisa-pandya/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2K60vBPGFmbiMfZImIXwIw

Image Credits
Photos by Seema Lisa Pandya, and Baptiste Methivier, Neel Murgai, and Luis Vidal