Camilla Dilshat is a sculpture/installation artist of Uyghur ethnicity born and based in London (b.1998). She is currently a student on the MA Fine Art course at City & Guilds of London Art School and has a studio in Brixton.

Emerging from experiential reflections, Camilla Dilshat ponders about how the body-experience forms an understanding of one’s diasporic identity while also shattering your sense of place. Her life has been littered with misunderstandings from others towards her own Uyghur ethnicity. Her body felt invisible, and her mouth felt unequipped to handle the tiring task of self-definition. As a therapeutic venture, she engages in sculpture making to confront the uncomfortable itching beneath the skin. She picks away at and exposes areas of discomfort, and disconnection, while simultaneously unearthing areas of comfort: her mother, her mother’s knowledge and her precious homecooked food. Endless noodles are laboriously made in Camilla’s household and thus in her studio, warmly weighing her stomach into a sense of place.

Surreal, breathing sculptures traverse between bodily states: fullness, satisfaction, suffocation, and emptiness to name a few. Voluminous gourds speak of the stomach, body, and mouth, spurting and sucking up doughy wiggles. The domestic and the abject leaks out of her works - intimate in size consisting of materials such as: fatty latex, severed ceramic tongues, hair, raw wool, and uncanny references to food. Through a ritual and haptic process reflective of her Mum’s food preparation, Camilla rolls, squeezes, and dusts with “flour”. Sandy textures and dry branches speak strongly of location. Of a homeland that now precariously exists in fleeting memory, overshadowed by a stifling political narrative of ethnic genocide. Through a strong sense of process and materiality, Camilla follows a long slippery noodle towards her heritage and a grounded self, exposing the coexistence of comfort and discomfort that defines the diasporic experience.