Extras: Portia Roy & Art of Making the Invisible Seen

The title of Portia Roy's most recognised series is a single word: Extras. Simple, blunt, but once she explained it, it became impossible to forget.

"I think it's very direct," she says. "Nobody wants you, and you are just there on a boat, going from here to there. The countries are refusing to let you enter their borders. You cannot live in your own country because of the conflicts, because of the war, because of religious unrest."

She pauses, then continues: "Somehow you are almost a citizen of nowhere, and you are wanted nowhere."

The sadness she felt at this reality is what gave the series its name. "If the world doesn't belong to people, then what is it?" she asks. "If a country doesn't need its people, doesn't care about the people, then what is the point? We are just some extra people."

It is not a provocation. It is grief made visible. And it quietly returns us to the larger question: can art change the world, or does it simply reveal what we refuse to see?

Materials That Carry the Journey: Making the Invisible Seen

To hold these stories, Roy works with plywood and recycled cardboard. The materials that might seem ordinary, but which carry their own quiet meaning.

She is drawn to plywood partly for physical reasons. Her figures are bold, she explains, and they need a surface that can withstand pressure. The material has to match the image. But cardboard entered her practice by accident. During India's COVID lockdown, she ran out of wood, and the shops were closed. What she had at home were stacks of Amazon delivery boxes that had accumulated over months of online ordering.

"I had to tear something to calm myself," she says. So she started carving into those instead.

The coincidence is not lost on her. Cardboard is a material of transit; it has been used to move goods across cities, countries, and oceans. It is what packages are made of, what gets loaded onto trucks and ships, and what is unloaded again somewhere else. That Roy ended up using it to depict people who were themselves being moved, those compelled, displaced, forced to travel.

It's one of those unplanned resonances that, in retrospect, feels entirely right. And in that quiet alignment of material and meaning, the question lingers again: can art change the world, or does it deepen how we understand it?

The Foot as Protagonist

In Foot Tells a Thousand Stories, Roy makes an unusual choice: there is no face. The image is dominated by a single, monumental foot.

The work was done during the COVID lockdown in India, when factories shut down overnight, and hundreds of thousands of migrant workers found themselves without wages, without transport, and with no way to return home except to walk, sometimes covering five or six hundred miles along empty roads and railway tracks. Many did not make it.

Roy was moved by photographs taken during that period, those images of torn sandals and worn slippers left on roadsides, some with traces of blood. "So much story," she says, "the photographer was telling with a piece of shoe, with a piece of slipper." That was what sparked the work.

When the Body Becomes the Narrative

"The foot is my main protagonist here, not the face," she explains. "The face doesn't have features, but the foot has." She chose to make the Foot monumental, to fill the frame. The scale in her visual language is a way of saying: this matters. Look here.

The body, in Roy's work, speaks when faces cannot. Posture, the weight of a step, the wear on a sole. These carry the truth of a journey more directly than any expression could.

In Not an Extra, this is what Roy's woodcuts ask of us: not sympathy, not solutions, but attention. To stop in front of an image and recognise, in those carved lines and worn surfaces, a life that was always there, waiting to be seen.

"The images are mine," she has said, "but the narratives are universal; it is visible all around us, waiting to be acknowledged."

And perhaps that is where the answer to can art change the world quietly reside, not in fixing it, but in making sure we no longer look away.