Swapna Namboodiri, Turning Ocean Plastic into Art in Adelaide

Swapna Namboodiri spent 6 years as a software engineer at Infosys. After office hours, she painted. She made things. The creative practice wasn’t waiting in the wings – it was already running parallel, every evening, for the entire duration of her engineering career.

The formal switch came later – when her daughter arrived and the job stopped making sense. Even then, she didn’t leave with a plan. She just stopped, and the art that had always been there expanded to fill the space.

From Bangalore to Doha to Adelaide, Swapna has built a practice that resists easy categorisation. She paints. She creates sculptural wall pieces. She works with upcycled single-use plastic. She makes wearable art that ends up on a 20-foot ramp at the Australian Wearable Art showcase on the Sunshine Coast. She does all of this without formal training and without gallery representation – and she’s been selling internationally since 2017.

What’s worth noting about the plastic work: she was using single-use plastic as a material long before sustainability became a framework people applied to art. The practice came first. The language caught up later.

The clarity of purpose is what eventually led to a commission from Bank Australia and Parley for Oceans – a large-scale installation launched at Martin Place, Sydney, marking the release of a bank card made from ocean-collected plastic. Swapna arrived in Adelaide in December 2023. She had that commission within her first year.

Her wearable art piece Amphitrite, a finalist at Australian Wearable Art on the Sunshine Coast, drew on coral bleaching, Greek mythology, and the Theyyam art form from Kerala – practiced in her own ancestral family. When she saw the finished piece on the model under stage lighting, she was in tears. It looked like Theyyam come to life.

She built 136K Instagram followers on raw studio footage and genuine process documentation. No styling. No posing with the paintings. Just the work, shown honestly, over years. She found Art Finder through Instagram, registered without knowing how to put together a CV, and started shipping work to the UK and the US from Doha – at a time when nobody else in Qatar was doing it.

Adelaide has taken to her quickly. Brighton City Environmental Awareness Award winner. Burnside Environment Awards runner-up. Feature artist with Burnside Council. First 18 months.

What’s consistent across the whole story is that Swapna didn’t wait for the right conditions. She started making things in every city she landed in, figured out the practical problems as they came, and kept going.