Roy Ananda

Roy Ananda (b. 1980) is a South Australian artist, educator and writer best known for his explorations of popular culture fandom. Drawing on his wide-ranging interests and hobbies – in particular his love of the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, works of science-fiction and horror by H. P. Lovecraft, the Star Wars franchise, comics and cartoons such as Looney Tunes, Tintin and Asterix, as well as 1980s and ‘90s hip-hop music – over the past two decades Ananda has produced materially and conceptually driven works that explore his identity as a fan.

Born and raised in Adelaide, Ananda began making art from a young age – he held his first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings at only fifteen years old. Upon completing high school he embarked on undergraduate studies at Adelaide Central School of Art, where, since 2004, he has lectured in sculpture and drawing and today holds the position of Head of Drawing.

Ananda’s early works are typified by process-based drawing, sculpture and installation, whereby Ananda sets himself strict parameters or rules of play. Taking a cue from the instructional wall drawings of Sol le Witt or Richard Serra’s Verblist (1967-68) – a list of verbs to be used as a creative prompt – Ananda’s self-imposed rules were similarly strategic in opening up the processes of making to forces of chance, “sculpture is an action as much as it is an outcome.”[1] In Twelve Tasks (2007), for example, Ananda made use of lingering detritus in his studio, including material refuse from previous works, to dictate an over-engineered sculptural form. A governing colour scheme in butter yellow, acid green, pink, white, grey and cornflower blue was drawn from his favourite pair of sneakers at the time and used as a schema in determining its composition. “Play is a central principle of almost all my work… It can be a childish, frivolous thing. But, it is also a very productive intellectual tool.”[2]

[1] Roy Ananda, unpublished interview with Belinda Howden, Adelaide, 18 September, 2021.

[2] Ibid.

Ananda’s sense of play and procedural approach to sculpture is taken to an extreme in his large-scale installation Thin walls between dimensions, created for the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Divided Worlds. Installed in the subterranean galleries of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Thin walls between dimensions transformed an early iteration of a Dungeons & Dragons gridded battle-map, designed by Gary Gygax in 1979, from a two-dimensional plane into an increasingly three-dimensional environment. Ananda routed elements of the map onto sheets of blue-print-toned MDF, and devised a complex numerical and geometric system of angles and mitres to generate the enveloping immersive landscape. It was a “blunt analogue for the way the fantasy setting can take on a level of reality in the player’s imagination.”[3] As audiences moved deeper into Thin walls between dimensions, Ananda imagined it as one of the “great mythological descents into the underworld, like Orpheus going down to rescue Eurydice.”[4]

The map represented an imaginary space but one that has been inhabited in the minds of probably tens of millions of people…It is a game that has loomed large in my imagination since I was about ten years old. I feel certain that a childhood and adolescence spent playing these kinds of games – inhabiting those imaginary spaces and designing them – has impacted my life as a sculptor.[5]

[3] “First Fridays Online: In-Conversation with Roy Ananda and Andrew Purvis”, Art Gallery of South Australia, video, 50:09, 6 August, 2021

[4] “Roy Ananda – Thin walls between dimensions”, Art Gallery of South Australia, filmed as part of the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Divided Worlds, video, 00:47, 30 May, 2018,

[5] “First Fridays Online: In-Conversation with Roy Ananda and Andrew Purvis.”

In the same year, Ananda began an ongoing series of diagrammatic drawings – Annotations (2018 – current). For the exhibition Roy Ananda: Further Annotations (2021), Ananda was invited into the Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection to select and annotate two works: Peter Booth’s Painting 1982, whose dystopian, cannibalistic scenes appeared both shocking and amazing to Ananda as a young visitor to the gallery; and Olafur Elliason’s Dark Matter Collective, an installation of 217 glass orbs with light-bending properties that, for Ananda, invoked the magic and multiverses of science fiction and fantasy.

To produce the annotations, Ananda traced, scaled and redrew component parts of each work in his signature colour – Uni Posca Light Blue No. 8 – and then attributed them with references to music, literature, objects, scenes and characters from cinema and television – a fandom paint by numbers.

The Annotations series can be read in a tradition of conceptualism too. As highly pared back pictograms, the works draw on the minimal visual language of conceptualism while also encouraging the viewer to travel with Ananda, skipping and jumping from reference to reference, evoking whole worlds in the mind’s eye.