ABOUT

Reshma Valliappan combines her experience as a mental health activist with the healing power of art. Reality and the hallucinatory fuses together in the world of Malaysian born Indian visual storyteller artist Reshma Valliappan.

Her graphical to grotesque, abstract to impressionistic styles depict the constant existential variables of the human condition that cannot be defined or constraint to one style, medium or representation.

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Reshma Valliappan is recognized as a mental health advocate. She shortened her name to Val Resh in the beginning of her career to protect her identity with schizophrenia. She lives between the land of what is termed to be madness and psychosis without medications while having shared her insights of the shamanic, spiritual and esoteric with many others.

When creating, she is guided by the voices she hears and the visions that surface during the process. Her art is never planned while the creative process is experienced as a portal between two or more dimensions which can be seen and felt in her work. Her goal is to evoke a sense of different sensory experiences where colours can be heard, movements can be felt and that reality be a shared hallucination. 

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Resh was born in Malaysia in 1980 and lives in India where she works as a mental health activist and educator. She is a self-taught artist.

Her spiritually initiated name is Vajri which means firmness of spirit and spiritual power.