How Radhika Chitalia Transformed Her Late Father’s Passport Into A Work Of Art

I know I’m one of the few lucky people who have the opportunity to build a career doing what I love, and I cherish it more than anything. But sometimes, when your hobby and passion collide with what you do for a living, it can take the magic out of the real thing. It can become tedious and even gruelling sometimes. The pressure of performing sits on you like a boulder that you can’t quite keep down.

Which is why on the weekends, even if it's just for ten minutes, I try to write for myself. Just for myself. To remind myself that this thing I love can be just mine and not something I have just monetised. And sometimes that lack of pressure leads to my best work. Which is again, just for my eyes, because I’m not really doing it for anyone. And I recently felt like I was alone in feeling this way. That was until I spoke to illustrator and artist, Radhika Chitalia.

Recently, while cleaning out her father’s belongings, she and her family didn’t quite know what to do with his documents, as it had been some time since he'd passed way. So, Chitalia decided to take them back to Denmark, where she’s based, to see what she could do with them. She started painting on its empty pages, and what started with just one page led to her working on all sixteen. Speaking about the journey of this project, she says, “So it started with me not wanting to let go of it (the passport), and then also I feel like had he been around that passport would have been, of course, utilised for much more — the way he would have liked it, but this is probably the second best I can do.”

The project was just meant to be something she did for her, and her mum and sister. “It was for me; it was also something I thought my mom and sister also might enjoy. It makes it into a thing we can hold on to without it just being a document that's thrown away. Now it's something that we can own as a piece of art, you know?"

As soon as she went on this journey, she received a lot of positive feedback and love online, and that just made her feel like this could be something bigger. A lot of people messaged her that they were inspired to do the same thing with the objects their lost loved ones left behind. What was once an everyday, mundane object, one that could easily have become a painful reminder of loss, was transformed into something beautiful and deeply meaningful.

While speaking about what inspired her artistically for this project, she said that she just played with it, without the weight of performance. Because of the lack of pressure to make it appeal to anyone but her and her family, she could take her time and just go wherever her mind went, depending on how she felt that day, with no restrictions, treating it almost like a diary. Artistically, Chitalia was inspired by Mughal miniature art and how they incorporate pigments using squirrel hair brushes, and you can see it coming through in the distinct blue and green colours she used.

The freedom is what makes the project so moving. Grief often demands that we hold on while simultaneously teaching us to let go. Chitalia’s passport paintings exist somewhere in between those two impulses. They are neither an attempt to preserve her father exactly as he was, nor are they a way of moving past him. They transform an object marked by absence into one filled with presence. Like the writing I return to on my weekends, it was never created with an audience in mind. It began as a private act of care and remembrance. And in the absence of pressure to perform, it became something honest, and that's what has allowed it resonate with people in the way that it has.

Follow Radhika on Instagram here.

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