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Our Carramar students have the great fortune of learning from one of Perth’s up-and-coming mixed-media artists, Sid Pattni. 

Sid is an Indian-Australian artist, who was born in London and joined St Stephen’s School as a visual arts teacher in 2020. He began painting when he was very young but only took it seriously when he was in high school himself, where he was lucky to have a teacher that cultivated his passion for painting which then led to Sid studying Fine Arts at Curtin University.  

 “Painting is just something I have always loved doing. The act of painting is a form of meditation for me.” 

 Much of Sid’s extraordinary work is characterised by a combination of paint and embroidery, with some works featuring seven or eight thousand stitches.  

 “Embroidery has a rich cultural and historical context in India and I wanted to add to that lineage in my own way so I started hand-embroidering my portraits and haven’t looked back!” 

Sid recently held his debut solo exhibition, ‘The Story of Us’ which was the culmination of 12 months of intense work creating mixed-media portraits of refugees and asylum seekers that Sid met and worked with personally. Audio recordings of the portrait sitters telling their own stories accompanied each image. 

“I do volunteer work at the Centre for Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Detainees. Through that work I met some incredible individuals and was inspired to tell their stories. A lot of the discourse on asylum seekers and refugees is negative so I wanted to create a body of work that allowed them to take control of the narrative to tell their story”. 

 “It was both harrowing and rewarding. I heard them tell me about their traumas and difficulties in coming to Australia. That was very difficult thing to process. However, they are also some of the most resilient and optimistic people I’ve ever met, so I learned a lot and am a better person for having met them”.  

 The last twelve months has been incredibly busy for Sid, balancing work on ‘The Story of Us’ with a teaching role at St Stephen’s School – experience which helps our students understand what “being an artist” really means.  

 “I think working in my art practice and teaching art allows me to give the students a realistic idea of what it means to be a professional working artist. The idea of being an artist sounds very romantic, but there is a lot of work involved and a lot of that work doesn’t involve a paintbrush.  

 “It’s a busy but incredibly rewarding life. I always encourage students to do whatever it is that makes them happy. If that is painting, sculpting, printing, or drawing, then do that whenever you have some time. My advice is to cultivate a love for the process and the rest will take care of itself”.  

You can follow Sid on Instagram @sidpattni to stay engaged with his career and see other examples of his work, including an incredible portrait of Dr Karl Kruszelnicki. 

 Read the ABCNews coverage of Sid’s debut exhibition