top of page
Tarun Butta
All Posts


Strategic silence
Egg Tempera on Gessoed Panel 72' × 48' in Perception is not neutral it is trained almost algorithmically. I have spent decades training perception as a jewellery designer first and later within the pedagogical traditions of Fine art. Gradually developing a visual literacy just as a physician has developed the perceptual literacy to recognise pathology in what appears to be an ordinary body, the ability to perceive relationships that are invisible to an untraine

Tarun Butta
Jul 133 min read


The Labyrinthine Ossuary
I have never believed that a medium is inherently superior to another. Every material carries its own way of thinking. Yet tempera on wasli paper has become the only surface that does not ask me to compromise. If egg tempera did not demand an inflexible ground, it might have been my medium of choice. It is possible to work with it on heavy paper or stretched canvas, but eventually the dried skin of egg and pigment will crack with a slight bend What keeps bringing me back to t

Tarun Butta
Jul 103 min read


A Liminal Cognitive State Where Truth is Experiential not Discursive
Mix media on Canvas - 2025 There is a close split between enacted self and the witnessing self . In a dream or in heightened states of perception ‘Tarun' becomes like a character whose behaviours can be observed from a second position of awareness . For convenience let us call that awareness ' I '. ' I ' notices automatic participation in inherited social rituals mistaken for politeness, intimacy, obedience and notice that they are not necessarily aligned wi

Tarun Butta
Jul 82 min read


How Culture Colonizes Perception. Field Notes on an Organism I Have Begun Calling 'The One Who Counts'
I cannot say with certainty when I first encountered it. Like most successful organisms, it avoids dramatic entrances. It prefers inheritance. By the time you notice it, it has usually been living inside your language for years. I don’t know what it looks like. I’ve only seen the identities it borrows. Yesterday it borrowed the face of someone I hadn’t met in almost a decade. We exchanged the usual rituals of remembering. Somewhere between the weather, work and the years that

Tarun Butta
Jul 43 min read
bottom of page