‘Evolving’ is a conversation between two artists in India during the pandemic.
An improv conversation that started in the Covid year, grew into an interaction that would impact both of the artists’ lives quite personally.
Both from Govt College of Art, Delhi, never having had a verbal interaction during their college years, were stuck in two different zones in the year 2020 with their shares of traumas and transformations.
They come across each other through a mutual WhatsApp group and start talking about life.
Aditi shoots her first reflection through an illustration, Archie decides to reply through another. Before they know, it turns into an interactive medium they haven’t explored before.
What you get to see is the raw conversation as it went, with texts on illustrations and sketches, without any prior intent of compilation.
—Aditi Purwar & Archisman K
Author | Aditi Purwar
Aditi Purwar is a graphic storyteller whose work weaves vivid visuals with emotionally resonant narratives. Born in 1992 in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, she began her career in engineering before pivoting to fine arts. She earned her bachelor’s degree in painting from the College of Art, Delhi, where her distinctive visual language began to take shape, later evolving into graphic and illustrative storytelling.
Her collaborative work *Evolving* exemplifies her poetic conversation with a fusion of painterly and narrative elements. Aditi pursued her MA in Graphic Storytelling at LUCA School of Arts, Brussels, further refining her approach to visual narrative.
Her debut graphic novel *The Tea-Cup Set* was acclaimed for its bold yet tender portrayal of childhood in a patriarchal society. In *The Sky Is Filled with Water*, a semi-autobiographical, non-linear narrative, she explores migration, marriage and identity through shifting artistic styles and timelines, blurring the line between dream and reality.
Aditi’s stories often bridge the personal and political. She frequently collaborates with studios and organizations to research the everyday lives of people and their socio-political contexts. Now based in Belgium, she continues to expand the boundaries of graphic storytelling, blending traditional and digital techniques to create work that resonates across generations.
Author | Archisman K
Archisman is a day dreamer and a visual storyteller. With a childhood immersed in moving between cities, his heart lies in travelling, collecting stories and conversations while exploring different mediums to capture them. He is currently based in Bangalore, working as an illustrator, a designer and sometimes an animator, mostly collaborating with individuals and collectives working around education and ecology.
He writes, sketches, muses trees and old buildings in limbos of different lives.
