Mira Dayal’s background as a writer and editor is central to her artistic practice, profoundly shaping how she thinks about form and intention. “I think of visual art as a language,” she says. “You could say that I’m ‘editing’ the physical materials, concepts, and immaterial ideas and formal languages I’m working with. I’m manipulating systems of meaning, trying to say things with them, or sharpen what has been said.”

In her ongoing series “Language Objects,” Dayal creates delicate steel sculptures that evoke tools and materialsassociated with writing, memory, and narrative. Through these pared-down forms, she invites viewers to slow down, look closely, and consider how the structures of language that surround us—from ancient scripts tocontemporary artificial intelligence—inform how meaning is made. In doing so, the work draws attention to the many systems that lie beneath our ability to communicate.

Dayal’s acute fascination with layered meaning extends to her use of steel, a material with many conceptual associations, including architecture, public space, mass-produced objects, and infrastructure. “Steel is a material we see everywhere but we don’t often think about how it is produced or worked into the forms we see it in,” she explains. The metal’s malleability (it’s an alloy created by combining different metals into something both adaptable and structurally strong) offers her a productive tension. “This aspect allows me to play with the spectrum between drawing and sculpture or drawing in space, which I’ve always found exciting.”

The winner of the 2025 Fountainhead Residency Untitled Artist Prize, Dayal spent her time in Miami preparing for her solo booth at Untitled Art Fair with Spencer Brownstone Gallery, while also immersing herself in the city’s coastal rhythm and forging new connections within the local arts community. “It feels like I’m planting lots of seeds here, and I’m excited to see what grows,” she said.