Arulu is an interdisciplinary artist based in Black Mountain, North Carolina. She specializes in sculpting clay and paper-mache masks inspired by her elaborate dreams and the spiritual dimension of the natural world. Arulu’s interest in making masks originates in a reverence for the changing body, and the way masks articulate our own multiplicity. She is further inspired by the ancient ceremonial use of masks worldwide for healing, protection, and communication with spirits and ancestors. Her watercolor paintings and ink drawings expand upon the same world that her sculptures and masks inhabit, illustrating an evolving pantheon of therianthropic and hybrid creatures and spirits. Making art is Arulu’s way of tending to relationships with an intensely animate world and courting its wisdom. She dances with her masks in collaborative performances with musicians, hosts renegade art exhibitions, and teaches mask-making workshops. Arulu is also a performing musician, clothing designer, and photographer.
Arulu began tattooing by hand as an accidental art school initiation almost ten years ago, and instantly fell in love with the craft. Since then, she has formally studied with established tattooers, and now practices in a private studio. Arulu combines both handpoke and machine techniques to create depth and texture in her tattoo work. She believes that tattooing holds the power to enable the embodiment of prayer or intention and works closely with her clients to create personally meaningful ceremony around the process of designing and receiving a tattoo. Arulu’s tattoo work has two distinct styles: one is very figurative and often depicts hybrid creatures; the other is more abstract and uses varying concentrations of dots and bold lines to create labyrinthine movement that complements natural bodily contours.
Arulu has a BFA in Art & Design from the NYS College of Ceramics at Alfred University where she specialized in ceramic sculpture..
Arulu’s art can be found on display and for sale through Caravan Art Bazaar events around Asheville, at Odyssey Clayworks in Asheville’s River Arts District, and at Folklore gallery in Santa Fe.
Artist Statement
My work functions as a dream does: out of chaos, it delivers an antidote & evaporates in the same breath. I collect clues and piece them together like scraps of fur, red thread, clay, & brush strokes. Form & color & texture. I believe material is animate, and I craft objects by amplifying & complementing the voices of their constituents to illuminate the stories we are born from. Art is a metabolism obsessed with unanswerable questions & I’m devoted to translating the broken sleeping tongues of the ghosts who still walk here to make sense of the impossible. We are animated by lightning, whose lucidity stirs the memory of something ancient in us. My hands are the tools of that knowing beyond thought, in service to honoring the living earth and our responsibility to the world we will leave behind. I am too small to understand why, but I throw myself against the dark regardless. We are all shapeshifting matter with many faces, and my work is to wear every one of my faces with integrity.
