Chemat Dorjey completed his BFA in Sculpture from the Institute of Music and Fine Arts, University of Jammu, in 2012. In 2015 he received his MFA in sculpture from the Faculty of Visual Arts, Banaras Hindu University.

Chemat’s work draws from his experience of growing up in the village of Sakti, in Ladakh. His early years were spent taking the livestock grazing into the high pastures, watching the fields of barley turn golden, playing among the willow trees, turning prayer wheels at the local monastery, seeing his mother spin wool and spending evenings listening to elders narrate stories about a fantastical past. As he grew up, he began to recognise distinctly Ladakhi cultural markers, largely in the form of Buddhist religious edifices, prayer walls, chortens (stupa), carvings in the rock face. Some of these shapes began to enter Chemat’s workevoking his imagination to reflect the technologies and aesthetics of Ladakh. Working in different mediums from wood to metal, stone, fibreglass, acrylic and paper, each piece of his draws out the impression of an organic fusion between the land and the features that compose it. Through impressions of the rocky terrain or the harsh realities of living at a high altitude, forms of vernacular architecture clinging to the steep hillside, the subtle beauty of a lotus, the slow amble of a yak, a belief in the mythical dragon, Chemat reveals the intimate aspects of life in Ladakh. But he is most obsessed with the objectification of the ‘spindle’ – using the spiralling device to convey the Buddhist metaphor of the constantly spinning, endless circle of life. Beyond that, it represents the primordial axis, the ancestors, the ebb and flow of our very existence.