MALA
HASSETT
Fine Art 

WHY I DO WHAT I DO

​​

I grew up in India, where colour is relentless. I now live in Dorset, where it is quieter but no less insistent. The distance between these two places is probably where my painting lives.

​

I begin with landscape - its graphic lines and edges giving me a composition to work with. Sometimes this is Dorset, other times a researched image. Once the structure is in place, I imagine it as a length of silk, and choose colour accordingly. The painting becomes, in some sense, a sari: a landscape dressed in Indian silk.

​

Colour is my primary material, but surface is never far behind. Working in oils and acrylics - often on the same canvas - allows for shifts in surface quality that a single medium couldn’t produce. Grids, striations, woven textures and surfaces that retain the memory of their making recur throughout, owing as much to textile as to cliff top geology. Where restraint and excess coexist, as it often does in a sari, is where I want the paintings to sit.

​

Dorset provides the starting point. Colour usually has other plans.

​

​

EXHIBITIONS 
Upcoming: Dorset Art Weeks group exhibition at Jubilee Hall, Poundbury May/June’26 ~ group exhibition by Dorset Colourists at Eype Centre for the Arts, June/July'26 ~ June to Au’26, exhibition at Nothe Fort Weymouth, culmination of residency.