I’m at the cusp of finding momentum in my work again. While my studio situation didn’t change as much since the start of the year causing a major slump in creative production, it led me to finally make a necessary pivot in my life— moving to a different country (starting next month). Its a decision that took its time and lot of patience to bear fruit. The aim is to build my life in a new place, a city which I love, and elevate my work to new heights. Having hope is the coolest thing ever. I say this all the more after finishing Jane Goodall’s Book of Hope which has shifted my consciousness greatly.

I’m really looking forward to this much needed change because I know something new is about to emerge in my work and it needs the right environment to fully blossom. We owe it to our creative spirit to give ourselves a life of soulful beauty and goodness. This is also the first time in a very long time that I’m building the long-term vision for my practice more sincerely than ever. I’m more focused on what’s emerging internally and answering those needs than looking for validating markers outside. I owe so much of this to my spiritual discipline. The stronger my inner voice becomes, the lesser I need the assurances of the world. Having faith in one’s work is such a gift, a way to see clearly through the madness. That’s how you get your power back.

I’m very much in love with my artistic intuitions now. It teaches me how to exist with my craft, how to protect it, how to be in touch with my humanness above all else. This intuition only grows with the more work I quietly put into the craft. The work teaches you how to do it. The more I work with my hands, the more I find my humanness charming; the more I get in touch with what keeps me alive.

Some questions I’ve been meditating on as I make moves in silence:

• In what ways am I present in my life right now? In what ways am I absent?

• How do I make the room for safety in my body bigger as things feel more and more uncertain?

• What does it mean to walk the middle ground between transcendent work and meeting the demands of living a good life? How can it be shaped by my own authority and no one else’s.

• Am I being honest with my work? What is it asking from me at this moment in time? (My therapist asked me this question a long time ago and I find myself orbiting it still.)

• What moments do I find myself oblivious to my humanness?

• What if it was easy?

xo

I recently got my hands on a digital copy of Ursula Le Guin’s Dancing at the edge of the world and one of the essays that I jumped to in the book was ‘world making’. I think of ULG as my personal soothsayer, constantly communicating with me through the astral realm. Every time I find myself circling an important question around my practice, I stumble upon a work or a quote of hers that gives me a renewed sense of direction. The questions I find myself asking lately is: why make new worlds at all? Why is world-building so important to me? What is it in service of? And especially at this moment, where everything feels to be on the brink of something, teetering at the precipice—at this fragile interstice between possibility and endless collapse, what does it mean to meet the end times?

Ever since I was a child I would have dreams about the world ending— some kind of natural calamity or a giant sunflower (yes a giant sunflower) eating up humanity. This explains why I have always been obsessed with stories of other worlds through the lens of science fiction. Thankfully, such dreams have reduced over time, but they show up every once in a while. I’ve read enough of Carl Jung to understand that dreams like these often imply internal transformations, but do these dreams belong only to me or emerge from the collective energy of living inside a historically anxious moment? It’s definitely both.

To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.

-excerpt from the chapter ‘World-making’

I thought of this quote over and over again during the recent student-led protests across India demanding the resignation of the education minister. The whole country was gripped with the wild adrenaline of the youth screaming for change, for a new world that could hold their hope for a future with tenderness and accountability. So much has been lost in the name of progress, in service of capital, by those in power who only have hammers for hands. In another article talking about this political crisis, the writer mentioned that this adrenaline of youth is powered by hopelessness. And I couldn’t help but wonder, that perhaps its the loss of the innocence of an old world that has rendered us hopeless, that has left us quite lost as we do not yet know what a new world may look like— what it may include and exclude. Yet, there is also a part of me that disagrees with this statement; I do not think one can fight without having hope as your armour. To make a new world, to remake the world, we need a lot of hope that we can get.

When facing the apocalyptic, how may we learn to live? How may we sustain hope? Perhaps all one can do is dance. And maybe this dance is the good fight that is always fought at the edge of things. The edge where everything tips right over into darkness, before it touches the other side. Watching the plethora of reels shared by Gen-Z creators of my country treating this crisis with such lightness and humour made me realise that the point really is to keep dancing to preserve the eternal rigour of the imagination. The only way to manifest new worlds is with a lightness of every step. The one who dances always wins.

What artists do is make a particularly skillful selection of fragments of cosmos, unusually useful and entertaining bits chosen and arranged to give an illusion of coherence and duration amidst the uncontrollable streaming of events. An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen to or watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity. And yet all it is is an explorer’s sketch-map. A chart of shorelines on a foggy coast.

-excerpt from ‘World-making’

As an artist, I continue to learn the truth that the ‘world’, or our ideas of it are always ending. And the tradition of art expects that we learn to dwell at the edges, foraging skilfully the fragments of the old and new, the unusually useful and entertaining bits to create a sense of perspective amidst the ‘uncontrollable stream of events’. I suppose this is the joy of world-making—-to create emotional longevity from the womb of chaos. The edges, the end, is where life actually meets us at its wildest and most resilient. The edge of a question, of a story, of a governance, of an idea, of our bodies. At the microscopic empty spaces between tissues and cells that make up the boundary territories of us, we can sense the world gushing in at the shoreline. As Ursula Le Guin said ‘that is what the practice of an art is, you keep looking for the outside edge. When you find it, you make a whole , solid , real, beautiful thing; anything less is incomplete.’ If anything can be anything, there are an infinite number of edges. We are always on the edge, hungry to conceive a new world, to dance the very important dance of renewal—this is perhaps the promise of staying human: that we never grow tired of dying and being born over and over again.

xo

While part of this is true, I find this lightness uniquely helpful while pursuing my research interests—which are usually quite varied. Research gives me the ability to hold, and more importantly play with multiple temporalities at once. And I’ve noticed that the term ‘play’ can be frowned upon in the alleyways of academia but I’d like to contend that real knowledge lives at fringe territories—lingering at the fuzzy horizons that mark the Land of the Unsaid and Unseen one can only approach with a playful spirit than by sharpened rationale alone. I’m interested in a kind of research process that allows me to de-structure (or destroy if needed) knowledge and its established truths and boundaries, unlearning then learning them creatively. To build new domains of theory, and entire worlds for that matter, the tool that must be carried is artistic research.

I find that blending theory with a punchy doze of speculation really makes knowledge creation very interesting. Theory is pure intellect, but speculation involves mind and body both. (I think of Donna Haraway’s hands as she moves them sensuously while explaining her philosophy in Storytelling for Earthly Survival.) Because the rationale of the body is inherently non-linear, making meaning takes a deeper turn towards truth, leaking outside of colonised perceptions of time and space. Artistic research wields the sword of speculation, jabbing and glitching the patterns of traditional thought, asking “hey, what if this were possible? What would happen then?” The issue arises when the apparent contradictions between lightness and sincerity are held quite rigidly. I used to hold these contradictions on a pedestal, thinking that my desire to work with interesting theoretical knowledge with a creative flair was perhaps a superficial approach. That bringing intuitive domains with the intellectual was not possible. But I realise that I can dive into the great epistemic depths without missing out on playing and creating with emotional rigour. Both are equally gorgeous. Sincerity and lightness go hand in hand. What matters here a lot is how both artistic and scientific temperaments balance each other out.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about my season of incubation and expression, my drive to research helps me build frameworks for authentic expression. In this sense, I’m really researching myself into being; becoming more honest and more truthful in what I have to say. Research helps me care more by being critical, and expression helps me be open hearted and unafraid of letting loose at the marginal lands of the unknown. Expression feeds the research, research feeds the expression—they are both erotically interrelated which brings me so much pleasure.

I suppose pleasure is really the end goal here. The pleasure of a fulfilled yet insatiable curiosity— a curiosity for craft to expand itself, for knowledge to be made whole and resonant. Pleasure makes hope possible and optimism achievable; hope and optimism generate momentum. I can’t promise that artistic research will offer a mechanical solution for a problem, but it certainly offers a refuge, a new way of perceiving and relating to things—which inevitably solves a lot of things. My honest and confident bet is that artistic researchers are going to be (and perhaps already are) the most sought after individuals to navigate the ongoing human-planet crisis—which is largely a perception problem.

xo

June has been pretty much about this. But it has also been about opening myself up to hope more fully and moving at the pace of trust as I return to the foundational question, with a scientific patience and poetic surrender: what does it mean to be alive and make meaning as a human in this moment?

On that note, here are 10 things that are supporting this inquiry lately:

1. This essay by the English writer Charles Foster has cleared a space of hopeful silence in me. The kind where you’re confronted with a vast horizon that invites instead of scares you into timidity. It’s such a relief to finally find a thinker who delves into the ‘what’ of being human than the ‘how’. It reminds me that creativity, our power to wield agency through symbolisms, is the true gift given to all of humanity. I am, however, left at the end with wanting more; and maybe that’s what Foster intends for his readers, to be left at the edge of their seat, seeking more answers.

2. Real Life Mag has launched a new column called ‘new feelings’ featuring essays from writers that explore emergent dimensions of affect in the age of digital media. Think of emotions like ‘ungooglebility’ , ‘unfleshing’ or ‘reality disappointment’— this stuff is for real.

3. I put myself to sleep the other night while listening to Rupert Sheldrake talk about how the Universe remembers everything. Grateful to all the vivid dreams it brought me <3

4. I can’t stop thinking about this painting by French artist Henri-Camille Danger ‘Les Lucioles’ (the fireflies) made in 1896. There’s something about the jewel-like tones of blue dotted across the haunting green abode of the sensual fireflies that feels so inviting.

   

5. I’ve recently started reading Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Languages of the Night’ featuring various critical essays by her on the genres of fantasy and science fiction. Her bold, deeply human yet transcendental storytelling has inspired my practice so much. In her essay ‘Why America is afraid of Dragons’ this particular line really struck out to me:

   

6. I am currently in love with the works of the artist Katie Patterson. One particular work that I’m particularly drawn to is ‘Fossil Necklace’: A necklace comprising one hundred and seventy fossils carved into spherical beads. It is a string of worlds, with each bead representing a major event in the evolution of life through the vast expanse of geological time. From the monocellular origins of life on Earth to the shifting of the continents, from the extinctions of the Cretaceous period triggered by a falling meteorite to the first blooming of flowers, Fossil Necklace charts the development of life on our planet. What’s interesting about this is how it also reminds me of prayer beads or japamala, often used by spiritual practitioners to enter into deeper states of meditation.

   

7. I keep returning to this soft manifesto by the artist Courtney Cassidy.

   

8. Pema Chödrön, in the absolute cutest way, talks about awakening one’s life-energy in this video titled ‘Train like a Jedi’.

9. A question for the times by T.S Eliot

   

10. The ones who believe in and make new worlds possible will save us. Octavia Butler teaches me to keep orbiting my life’s work around the sun of devotion .

    

    xo

The way is forever nameless.

-Lao Tzu

Lately, I’ve noticed a craving for aimlessness in me; to retreat from anything that preaches about being conclusive, productive, or goal-oriented. I’m exhausted with the constant instrumentalisation of my existence. Instead, I want to stare blankly into space for hours like my grandmother once did, foolishly count the number of leaves on trees, study the pressure of wind as it hits my skin—do something that can prolong that special, unadulterated sense of ‘not getting anywhere’.

I realise that the need of the hour is to become aimless for a little longer than we’re expected to. To not be constantly ‘locked in’ to a sense of achievement or ambitiousness which tends to create so much friction in the mind. I’m not interested in keeping up with the world anymore. Maybe it’s finally time to disengage and commit to lingering around in circles, spirals, and other odd shapes that promises to lead me back to myself. My best moments are when I discover a thought or an emotion that feels hard to put down and I go for a long walk as a practice of lingering around the shape of that emotional territory without the distractions from my phone. Sometimes I listen to river sounds and use the water’s language as a navigating device to chart my lingering adventure. Such practices remind me of an interesting term I discovered in James Bridle’s Ways of Being: circumnutate; which refers to ‘the slow, revolving, or elliptical growth movements made by the tips of growing plants, such as stems, tendrils, or roots. This self-powered movement helps plants navigate their environment often moving in a clockwise or counterclockwise spiral.’ Under that light my lingering is really a circumnutation. My elliptical, aimlessly slow movements are, in truth, oriented towards growth—helping me navigate the complexities of my environment with a revived agency.

Writing too feels like lingering around the breadth of reality, circumnutating with words at the tip of my fingers while still seated. I think of Toni Morrison’s advice on ‘writing what you don’t know’ and to ‘not be scared, ever.’ I come back to this advice often because like a spontaneous wander, writing is a form of self discovery. I don’t know anything but I’m willing to walk the distance, to make space for revelations to surprise me, to let myself unfold the more I find comfort in not knowing something. I write to linger over everything. The more I linger the more comfortable I am dealing with the uncertainties in my life. Every step forward is led by the slow ease of curiosity, not the urgency to reach an end goal. There is no failure in the school of lingering, and if you’re lucky, which you almost always are, you will end up making uncanny friends along the way.

The dream of my life

Is to lie down by a slow river

And stare at the light in the trees—

To learn something by being nothing

A little while...

- Mary Oliver, from Entering the Kingdom

I suppose our capacity to linger also has to do a lot with permission— allowing ourselves to meander away from restraining timelines, believing that exceptions are possible and normalising them in order to live a more meaningful life. Playfulness can only emerge when lingering is permissible. As an artist, I have to linger along the margins of an ambiguous idea before I can get to the clarity of its centre. Moving and gesturing like the tendrils too—spirallic and anti-spirallic—slowly and intentionally. My inner monologue goes something like —‘this doesn’t make sense to me yet but it is interesting, it’s pulling me in to be with it for as long as i can until I come out with some truth about it.’ My responsibility as a creative is to just listen and follow—that’s half the job done. I would like to imagine that perhaps this is the space where all ancient mysticisms emerged from—by lingering just long enough around a subliminal presence or idea that triggered a richness of poetic insight and soul driven purpose. A mystic knows that to comprehend the nuanced language of the divine, they must make room to linger softly without aim.

I find that lingering often asks us to disengage from the ways in which we exert power over our own selves—to constantly develop, to change, to get healthier, smarter, more eloquent, to prove something; all the while mirroring the dynamics and timelines of the external world in our interior reality. The fact of the matter is that we can let our guard down, that we are safe just as we are. This is the permission I knew I needed to give myself; to belong nowhere else but here. Over the past couple months, I’ve realised how lingering also softens my relationship to time. Rather than moving on the edge of volatile timeline shifts of our world, wandering off has helped me tap into my embodied and intuitive time scales— bringing me to a pre-verbal kind of intimacy with the slow, geological, animalistic and animistic vocabularies of time that run opposite to the calcified clockwork of capitalism. I feel closer to the vast and ancient timeline of a glacial, meandering river than I will ever be to the office hours of a boring multinational corporation.

The sheer beauty of being an artist is that, in a relentlessly utilitarian world where we are often cast as unconventional black sheep, we are granted an unusual freedom: to linger longer than we are expected to. Within such uninformed dismissiveness of the world, artists are unknowingly gifted the permission to be aimless; and in that crucible of aimlessness lies our purposefulness, making us the mystics of the contemporary age. An artistic mind can turn any space into a fertile landscape for lingering. The more I linger the more I find the world opening up to me, the more I soften into the sovereignty of my own life. In doing so I realise that there is still a lot more joy to be discovered, even in the molten horizons of planetary, social and political unravellings of our time.

xo

1. Green Wedge (1969), by Peter Alexander.

   

2. Matthew Szösz’s inflated sheet glass sculptures.

   

3. Brancusi’s ‘Sleeping Muse’ 1909 (a forever favourite).

   

4. This delicately carved hand-shaped jade pendant dating back to the ancient Olmecs.

   

5. Japanese architect and designer Fumiko Goto’s sensuous, soft and inviting ‘object jewelleries’.

   

6. The solitude-inducing, science fictional works of Egyptian artist Armen Agop. (I just realised how similar this work is to Fumiko’s work shared above!)

   

7. The mysterious stone egg of Lake Winnipesaukee discovered in the 1800s.

   

8. Zechariah’s Vision (2017) by French artist Laurent Grasso.

   

9. LA based artist Lily Clark’s meditative ‘Dew Point’ series.

   

10. This tender stone work by Japanese artist Akiko Sato, from her series titled ‘Touching time’.

    

    xo

So much of the artistic life demands one to keep returning to the source. I’ve been coming back to the question of what it means to live each moment in dedication to this centre, this source, that makes the supernatural aspects of creativity possible.

At this moment my practice is developing like a compost pile. I’m gathering, learning, reading, layering insights upon insights; tilling the land, sowing the seeds. In this process I have recognised my work’s true pace and how I’d like to design my work-life in alignment with my inwardness. I’ve realised that there are always two overarching seasons in my practice: expression and incubation. The season of expression is often defined as an energetic radiance. When all my creative desires and intentions are directed outward in the material realm, looking to find mediums and languages to express the velocity of my ideas with full force. While there is room for experimentation, the expressions are more refined—leading to a strong body of works and a thesis to back them up. My last season of expression started from early 2023 to mid 2025, after which the season of incubation began.

In this incubatory timeline, I’m hardly creating. I’m imploding. All energies are moving steadily, sometimes chaotically, inward. I’m being called to reflect, to observe, to take notes, to rest, to get supremely bored. Everything in my body and soul refuses to follow the modern traditions of productivity. Even when I do feel like painting, I’m unable to produce a consistent body of work. And through this I’ve understood that this season demands a lot of inner work, with more space given to doing nothing, to play and experiment— an attempt at new mediums/skills/ideas. I find myself keen to build my writing voice with an urgency I can’t explain. I want to write about worlds and stories, and not just paint them. As though somehow writing could complete this unfinished circle of creative yearning. And this eagerness to write is taking me into some interesting depths of my sleepy subconscious. As I’m starting into the research phase for a new series of works, I want to make writing a necessary part of it. The exchange between painting and writing feels very fresh and full of possibilities as both inform each other in esoteric ways.

I have always loved my season of expression because there is momentum and an extroversion that makes me participate in the world actively. Incubation season is slow and introverted, a kind of withdrawal that demands my patience at its highest capacity. It’s the underworld of a creative life, a return to roots—I’m in the underground searching for my soul, not the company of the external world. It reminds me that I cannot be my highest creative self if I’m not doing the spiritual work that is expected from me, because both complement each other. With time I think I’m slowly becoming adept at navigating life’s uncertainty now. 5 years of meditation and breath-work practice has certainly helped me step outside of my mind and look at its fidgety nature with a sense of compassion.

Someone who’s helping me move through this moment of great reset is the artist, writer and opera singer Vanessa Aldrich. I’ve been obsessed with her sharp-tongued lectures on the ‘mythology of the artist’ on YouTube. She presents the framework of Joseph Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’ and demands us to move out from the adolescent view of our artistic pursuits and into a more heroic understanding of it—our creative coming-of-age. Something she said that really stuck with me was that ‘the mythological journey is the soul’s adventure through the human’, that all myths are unfolding in the field of our consciousness. I have been working through her incredible journal prompts lately and am stumped at the amount of crap I have believed about myself and my work over the years.

Incubating is when I am called back to the source— a stream running into a cave. Expression is when the source ushers forth into the world like a waterfall. While I gestate my creative energies, I am going back to studying, attending to those practices that support my inwardness. I have rekindled my devoted passion to reading which has helped me wean off of social media significantly, I’ve started writing more and more—on my substack and off; my observation and intuitive skills have deepened as have my meditations. The drop in expressive momentum has brought a steadiness of pace that I didn’t know I desperately needed. Perhaps I’m being ripened for the next big thing.

Maybe this moment exists to reorient myself back to playing soulfully. To keep showing up in the changing seasons of my work with an intensity I may have lost along the way. I don’t know how long this season of incubation will last and I cannot foresee how I will show up in my expressive season because everything is uncertain. The only sustainable trick is to say yes to life.

xo

In moments when I feel my faith arriving at obstacles, I turn to the lives of women mystics. Akka Mahadevi, a 12th century female poet-saint renounced all worldly belongings, including all her clothes, triggered by rejecting a forceful pursuant for her hand in marriage, to follow the path of absolute devotion to the divine. In search for her soul mate Lord Shiva, she made animals, flowers and birds her friends and companions, rejecting family life and worldly attachments. In the wake of her enlightened love story with the Source of the Universe, she wrote 430 spontaneous poems or ‘ vachanas’.

People,
male and female,
blush when a cloth covering their shame
comes loose

When the lord of lives
lives drowned without a face
in the world, how can you be modest?

When all the world is the eye of the lord,
onlooking everywhere, what can you
cover and conceal?

Following the same context, Lal Ded or Lalleshwari, a 14th century Kashmiri poet-saint shed her clothes along with the pretences of her world’s social structures to pursue the love of Shiva. Carrying with her only words of devotional intimacy, dripping from her mouth like raw honey:

I was passionate, filled with longing, I searched far and wide.

But the day that the Truthful One found me,

I was at home.

I am drawn to the shimmering devotion of such radical women mystics, ripened under the sun of a maddening love, the kind that could swallow the earth, who changed the world with their softness and intimacy with the unknown. There is something very luminous about the erotism to their surrender, an embodied aliveness that formed its own theology of liberation. Their bodies became active sites of transcendental experiences and freedom, a gateway to knowing the nature of god through it, not just beyond it. The longing expressed in their poems carries a distinct sensual charge, a precious mixture between flesh and the unmanifest. I see the image of a meditating Akka Mahadevi and feel fulfilled in my own body— whole, deathless. The sinuous curves of her hair covering her nakedness doesn’t feel like a ploy to hide the shame in vulnerability, but rather exhibits a confident and soft inwardness, a total acceptance of the sensuality of her being that transgresses the crookedness of social gaze. I find myself aspiring to be like her: at home in my nakedness, present, and unafraid in the wild.

When I speak of such quality of love that emerges from the feminine, I don’t mean a meekness or passivity that cannot hold suffering, but an active force that honours both life and death with a devoted intensity. It is the softness inherent in the feminine that makes alchemy possible, and enlightenment inevitable. I think of the Mexican folklore of the Bone Woman, La huesera, a mystical figure who gathered the bones of dead wolves and sang over their assembled skeletons, resurrecting them into enlivened wolves that soon transformed into joyous women freely running toward the horizon. The song being a breath of love which invoked the dead back into life, into joy. This is where I find the loving essence of the feminine finding its root: that there is ecstasy to be found even in the grip of pain, that softness persists even when the world has been shed away. In the love of the mystics, there is no fear of death. Their grace and silence doesn’t seek to compete, or lay claim, it simply reflects its worth in being alive, and to be in love with that aliveness. It shows me that everything I need is right here—the source of my pleasure, the answer to my desires, the reciprocation to all my passionate longings, the light to my grieving. They remind me that the only antidote to collapse is to live in love- ravenously, heroically, sensuously.

In my own work and creative journey, I have at times denied the instinctual intensity of my life-force to serve some random existential fit of resignation. I’ve been distracted by a culture of lovelessness, where love is misplaced from its centre to commodities and aspirational lifestyles calling it a ‘love for life’. I have desperately wished I could run into a forest, renouncing the world, with only flower garlands and thick dripping locks of hair covering my body as I scream the name of a god melodiously strung on my lips. Yet behind this yearning, all my spirit, body and mind were really asking of me, was to soften. A softening that invites the knowingness that love is always present notwithstanding the circumstances. Simply tuning in to the feeling that ‘ I am loved’ gives me reason to love the world with wholeness. I also do believe that it is inherent in women to feel reverence, to tap into the sacred without having been trained under a scriptural method. We are the beholders of beauty because our bodies are naturally wired to create the source of beauty: life. It now makes so much more sense when my therapist asked me a couple years ago if I was being honest with my work—I was simply denying myself the capacity of my devotion to be reflected in the work I do.

Why will women in love save the world today? Because women are waking up to the reality of a great separation between who they truly are and what they’ve been made to accept without their consent. Consumerism’s glittering myth of excess has rendered many of us seeking fulfilment in objects, asking us to place the rigour of our faith in the untenable rather than ourselves; while patriarchy —now encountering well deserved cracks in its foundation—has squeezed out every ounce of feminine joy to serve its notion of self-sacrifice. The awakening itself feels like a revolution that will matriarch a new age. The work of softness is urgent and I have been fortunate to meet many women who have realised this. It’s not about competing with our counterparts, neither is it about screaming the proof of our worth to the world anymore. It’s more about walking back home to our bodies, our essence. Back to the nourishing wellspring of femininity that was always here, unshaken, unbothered. This is a different kind of power that runs counterintuitive to any colonial or corporate definition of it. There is no need to forcefully exert one’s position because she already knows she belongs. I circle back to the image of Akka Mahadevi, to the words of Maya Angelou, radiant in a state of deep inner contentment and self-realisation that no possible form of torment could ever snatch away; a power that creates life-affirming realities.

The world belongs to women in love.

Perhaps the true gift a woman can give to herself is to realise the emancipatory ecstasy in being in love, and direct that enchantment inwards. I promise you, if you follow this inwardness with acute intensity, it will pierce through and touch the world with a softness that it desperately needs. And perhaps with some teasing, reach the love of God too.

xo

On that note, here’s a list of 10 things that currently have my attention:

1. I’m a sucker for projects that blur the distinctions between art and design, and lately I’ve been charmed by the works of Allan Wexler. I came across his book ‘Absurd thinking: between art and design’ that documents his 45 year long inquiry into muddying the dichotomies between fine and applied art. There’s a practicality to his madness and vice versa, which reflects a crazy dedication to his childlike sensitivities with a skillful bypassing of limitations.

   

2. There’s something about the artist Rachel Youn’s chaotically endearing kinetic sculptures which I find hard to distinguish from a robot funnily learning how to adapt to its burgeoning intelligence. The industrious perfectionism of machines meet the abstract funk of humanness. I wonder what this in-between state can be called.

3. I’m extremely obsessed with the Andromedan outfits in Bugonia. Not to mention the erotically charged, biomorphic interiors of the spaceship itself.

   

4. This slide from Virgil Abloh’s lecture quoting Rem Koolhaas:

   

5. This short lecture on God as Conciousness by Rupert Sheldrake (daddy of the morphic resonance and solar mind theory)

6. As I think a lot more about enchanted architecture, it was interesting to come across James Turrell’s designs for ‘Autonomous Structures’: unique architectural spaces designed for shaping the perception of light and space. I’m deeply inspired by his approach of merging his artistic sensibility with architecture as a medium to touch the sublime/transcendent. These structures remind me so much of Buddhist stupas, sacred hemispherical altars designed for prayer and meditation, which I encountered on my trips across Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh. There’s something uniquely soft-science fictional about the way it brings devotional and futurist aesthetics together.

   

   

7. This painting of a soft, ghostly apparition by Tala Madani.

   

8. I’m rekindling my obsessive reading habit again. And as I fall back into the rabbit hole of science-fictional literature, I’ve realised that creating the right ambiance is key to supporting my imaginary forays into interstellar regions by playing Pauline Oliveros in the background. While reading Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Gods Themselves’ (which is a book I highly recommend) here’s what I played to set a cosmically attuned mood:

9. This poem by Terry Nguyen:

   

10. The title of my current solo exhibition ‘I Seem To Be A Verb’ is after the eponymous book by the American Polymath Buckmister Fuller. His futurist thinking has had a great influence on the ways in which I develop my own worldbuilding practice. The book itself is quite a visual treat and you can read it here :)

With warmth and a lightness of touch,

Rithika

xo

Lately, the paintings of Agnes Martin have been speaking to me in this way. Repetitive, as if chanting a mantra quietly to themselves, and delicately restrained, as though she were holding the reins of her visual chariot with great alertness yet a lightness of touch. There is a rare intelligence in this kind of restraint.

Restraint can be a special skill utilised to maintain a continuous thread of mystery. To pull back and hold, to hide something crucial so that the desire for knowledge remains alive and the quest for understanding continues. Learning to say a great deal with little, expressing and withholding at once. This doesn’t mean you strip novelty to its bare bones, but you carve it intentionally—giving a taste of its generosity without revealing too much. This is a very delicate art, and increasingly difficult to practice when information and imagery are instantly accessible. We can miss out on the unique pleasure that comes from effortful understanding, from staying with a mystery long enough for it to unfold. Visual excess and over-interpretation creates an immediacy of information that collapses desire, patience and effort. I see Agnes Martin’s practice of restraint becoming more than just an artistic method, but a way of preserving mystery as a vital human experience.

Why should certain things be kept a secret? How does it preserve the desirousness in us to pursue what is truly novel and meaningful? And how do artists masterfully navigate the realm of mystery and manifestation? What can maintaining the mystery teach us as we move through a world of excess?

Martin’s work trains our gaze to rest, not rush to extract value. It challenges the modern mind’s desire to possess meaning, its impulse to name, resolve, and condense something vast and universal into a form that feels manageable. Yet the mind’s methods reach their limits more often than not, arriving at a gentle impasse where it must surrender to mystery instead. I’m reminded of the analogy of the mind as a wave: if the wave goes searching for the ocean, will it ever find it? Martin’s work offers repetition without resolution, with fields of near-invisibility, washed colour and transparencies held together by a meshwork of finely laid grids. This is a soft abstraction that cannot be solved. One can only breathe as it breathes, as one might with a solitary patch of grass or a forest river, learning to let things be.

Her work teaches me that to just gaze at the work itself is to realise the secret. To stay with the presence of this gazing, to surrender to it is how one may finally understand how to look at art. I am healed by the Agnes’s meticulously structured yet strategically flawed paintings. I want to sit quietly next to her soft, varying shades of blue and pink, listening to their stories unfold in some pre-verbal dialect.

I’m thinking about what John Berger wrote on the act of translation: “True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.” With art, translation functions differently. Unlike literature, it resists translatability. And it is precisely this resistance that gives it its power.

I often notice art-curious viewers approaching artworks as they would a piece of literature: Why doesn’t this make sense to me? What does it mean? What’s the story? This anxious pursuit of meaning becomes the primary obstacle to experiencing art at its fullest. Art gently dislodges the mind from its position as the center of human experience—the mind that insists on mediating everything through logic and reason. Instead, it invites us into the ‘pre-verbal’: into the somatic, intuitive space that forms the third point of Berger’s triangle. It is here, in this shared territory before language, that we meet the original spark from which the work emerged, and in doing so, complete the circuit between artist and viewer.

In a similar spirit, I am drawn to the 17th century tantric abstract paintings hailing from Rajasthan, India—small, intimate works often painted on handmade paper with mineral pigments, meant for solitary contemplation. These paintings are modest in scale, sometimes no larger than a manuscript page, inviting the viewer to come closer, to slow down. These works were created to be gazed upon as part of a spiritual discipline. Their restraint is devotional. A similar tendency I discover in Martin’s own paintings. By withholding narrative, figuration, and excess detail, they preserve a field of mystery that the viewer must enter gently, without force. These works unfold like ambient music; there is no way to logically hold it, because it belongs to the realm of experience, of transcendence—a space where mind becomes ‘no-mind’.

If art teaches us how to gaze, can it also teach us how to refrain? How might our days change if we learned to look without grasping, to stay with what is present without asking for more? Can we meet the ordinary textures of our lives with the same gentle attention? Can this softness of gaze finally reveal the secrets cleverly restrained by everything that surrounds us?

xo

God is so easy to find.

This practice of simultaneous observation and activity grounds my senses back into the present moment, into that uninterrupted flow state. Like meditation in motion, I notice my abilities to see, hear, smell, taste and touch intermingle and exchange capacities, leaving me at the mercy of new insights. I call this type of activity ‘heart work’, because every moment I spend dedicated to being present with all my senses is a service to the aliveness that sits inside my heart. In observing the simplest and quietest ways that beauty enters my life, I am energised so fully that I could flood a whole shoreline. Maybe this is what it means to be grateful.

Allowing beauty to enter our lives, to let it linger in our awareness, is so crucial for our flourishing. When I say beauty, I don’t particularly mean a person impeccably adorned, or the beauty of a luxury car, or the many manufactured artefacts of today that glitter and tantalise us— external forms of beauty that position us as either worthy or unworthy in relation to them. Beauty, for me, is that which grows ever so subtly in a moment of sustained and unhurried observation of something. It is not the thing itself which triggers beauty, but what is born from the silence that follows such devoted attention. This is the true foundation of an aesthetic experience, where beauty is met through relating, through the communion between the observer and the observed that subsequently invites a subtle quality of inwardness. In what Greek philosophers once described as ‘aesthesis’, sensuous perception precedes language. Before the intellect names, categorises, or explains, the senses are already in communion. Something inward opens. Something relational is formed.

As I carefully shell out the toothy red jewels of the pomegranate, I notice how much it ‘bleeds out’ in the process, splattering everywhere and staining my hands, sometimes my T-shirt, the walls, the floor as some seeds scatter around in their natural volatility. The afternoon sun colours this moment so ceremoniously that I could cry. I enter a realm of ambiguity, remembering when J Krishnamurthy said ‘beauty is where the self is not’. I find myself awake only in relation to this fruit I’m in a silent encounter with, and with the light of the sun that makes all of this possible. In the process of nourishment we metabolise each other. So where does this fruit end and I begin? At which point do we become the sun? I am reminded of a beautiful quote from David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous: ‘We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.’

This invocation of beauty is a gift that belongs to all of us. It is sensitivity cultivated through perception with complete attention. Perception which implies the work of the heart, or heart work. May we always be nourished by the promising touch of beauty, may we be led to the silence that is its source.

xo

Further reading:

Krishnamurthy on beauty and perception.

I wanted to kick things off by sharing some new visual explorations I’ve been quietly developing for the last couple months. I notice my collage/ image making skills deepening. With an intuitive sophistication, the works are coming off softer and more nuanced. As a new addition, I’ve used text to give more weight to the visual compositions. Most of the images have been sourced from the rich public domain image repository by Cosmos, which is my new favourite + safe place on the internet right now. I feel like a latent curatorial skill in me has been energised again!

Hope you enjoy this series :)

xo

*All images shown here are original artworks by Rithika Pandey. Please do not reproduce, archive, or reuse without permission.

Remember your body, this instant.

Locate your flesh, your matter as it meets breath.

Notice the wake of the earth’s slow gravitational embrace.

In the warmth of this grounding, know that you are held.

The body is the first ecosystem we encounter. We recognise as well as remember the world through love’s first touch: from our mothers. It is here where we discover the first shapes of desire, a longing to know the world is carved into us. To live ecologically means living in tune with the erotics of our being. That quality of aliveness which reveals itself deeply through the currency of its relations. Desire for deep intimacies can only be achieved through the vehicle of our bodies, entangling and reciprocating with the greater network of beings through a sharing of resources.

To know the world then, we must first long for it.

Everything eats and is eaten, time is fed

-Adrienne Lenker

In an ‘ecology of love’, the self is a composite of many selves. Touch is the universal language of creation where bodies meet other bodies in time and space: human, parasite, pollen, soil, cell, water, climate among myriad others. I am as much myself as I am the river I immersed myself in. We both carry traces of each other into the future. From a biological point of view, life reveals itself in the mystery of these non-verbal encounters. To think of our ecological relations from the humbling perspective of love may seem naive at first, but in truth, it requires a re-framing of the word itself that can only be accomplished by moving from the head to the heart. Thich Nhat Anh famously termed this form of embodiment as ‘interbeing’: the realisation that nothing exists independently, but is layered across a delicate rhizome of interconnections.

In its wake, modernity has de-eroticised the experience of nature, turning intimacy into superficial sentimentality. This has left many of us out of touch with our body’s participatory intelligence which overflows with an emotional eros, a desire to be constantly transformed. Knowledge can only be made whole when it is emotionally integrated. And for that we need the tools of re-enchantment, of making room for the ‘ poetic uncertainty’ that unfolds in these web of relations. We are called to live a sensuous life, and this is where the erotic finds its footing, where every cycle of my breath moves in conversation with that of a leaf’s green mouth.

Degeneration is also a love process. Every love story is rooted in the ecological, a mutual symbiosis that knows no duality between life and death. Such depths of interactions inevitably carry with it a distinct flavour of surrender, a devotional recognition of bodily dissolution. That matter will one day be lost in the continuous exchange with other forms of matter.

Perhaps this erotic interplay between love and decay are made more palpable in the imaginaries of our myths and folklores. When Persephone’s tentacular metamorphosis into a laurel tree helped her escape the perverted advances of Apollo, and when the decadent vegetal Gods dissolved & dismembered body into soil just to maintain the planetary cycles and seasons, we are reminded that life unravels interstitially—between beings, ideas and differences and that transcendence beyond duality is possible for us. They call out to our wilder side, the unkempt rainforests with its floor carpeted in ancient vines. It speaks to the heart of our urgent desire of belonging once again to the viridian dreams of Gaia. In the compost heap of our myths, the lovers always meet again: as soil and seed.

Notice the shape of your desire. How slippery is it? How soft? what language does it speak?

Which new tongue is it seeking?

If bodies are ecosystems built and sustained in relation to other ecosystems, then the restoration of our pleasure is deeply intertwined with ecological restoration. It isn’t hard to wonder then if pleasure can be understood as pedagogical. In the Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde reminds us that erotism, beyond sexuality, is a measure of one’s capacity for joy. Our aliveness is made known through the expression of erotic entanglements with other forces of life. That being in touch with our erotism can empower us beyond what we can imagine, it is often misunderstood as being dangerous and so we are taught to separate the erotic demands from the most vital areas of our lives other than sexual expression. And yet, the body, in its infinite wisdom still remembers this evolutionary pull, of being in some way united with the greater story of the living world. This pull itself is an erotic expression for fulfilment, for life to be energised by more life through re-connecting with natural states of attention and acceptance. Perhaps this continuous return to the feet of the erotic is what will keep us from drowning in the age of algorithmic confinements, where many of us find ourselves isolated from our bodily agency. Our erotic sensitivity is a reminder that we are an inseparable link in this ecology of natural relations.

In this sense, it’s safe to say that love truly is life’s momentum.

A prayer: May I always return to Love, and may Love always return to me. The way a lunar tide meets the shore, with absolute mercy.

xo

Sending sweet winter warmth to my readers this holiday season <3

1. Following the carefully laid trail of breadcrumbs. I’ve been returning to my old notes, diary entries, Spotify playlists, Pinterest boards and are.na channels over the years, deciphering my patterns of thinking, the permutations and combinations that have been recurrent across every touch point of my life so far. Rediscovering these long unchanged patterns of creativity in me across years feels nothing short of a miracle. Why did I preserve them? What was it about them that felt like a calling I wanted to hold close?

2. Asking myself why, with compassion. In asking ‘why’, sometimes I don’t expect an answer, because looking for one often reflects an urgency that needs to be addressed on a deeper level. Perhaps there’s a different kind of joy in just living with the questions alone, where I am awakened to something that lives at the fringes of my knowing. It reminds me that there’s always an intention, conscious or unconscious, underlying all actions. And simply by being aware of it, I can move forward with more purpose.

3. Reading creation myths. There’s something about the common human desire to romanticise our origins, to know how Something came from Nothing, how the wordless ‘Thing’ made the word. Maybe the purpose of being human is to keep crashing, in pious desperation, to the shores of life’s eternal return, it’s lovingly haunting uncertainty.

4. Watching the sunset from my building’s wide terrace is a moment I reserve everyday in service of awe. From the 30th floor, the sweeping views of the busy city, and how it mingles with the quiet labour of growing pollution can make one feel, more often than not, a little dejected about the future of this patch of land. But the soft setting sun is always there, quietly watching the unfolding of this strange world. I keep my head rested on the openness of the sky, reminding myself that home was always here, inside the heart of this emptiness. Maybe that is how grace finds us.

5. I’ve been reading devotional poetry by an 8th century Tamil ‘Alvar’ saint (i.e ‘the immersed one’) Nammalvar during bedtime recently. There’s a rich, honeyed quality to the translations of his works that invite a meditative state of mind, and inevitably, iridescent dreaming. Its texture enters me before language does. And I’ve discovered that in order for me to break out of the linearity of English, reading translations of ancient, regional devotional poems is a gateway to stretching the limits of this language to uncanny poetic realms.

6. My mother planted some white rain lilies on the window of our living room. During the rains, the lilies bloom in abundance and my mother always devotedly admires their presence in those grey months. Now that winter has arrived, the rain lilies have withered, but once in a while a flower blossoms hungrily towards the sun. Life always finds a way.

7. I stumbled upon this image of an African Weaver Bird, safely nested in her labour of love. It’s hard to explain how an image can have such an alchemical effect on you through its simplicity alone. Innocence persists in a world accustomed to dying over and over again. Maybe this innocence is its fuel for continuity. The more siloed we are in the concrete nests of human industriousness, the alternative language of this world extends itself to us in its slower, kinder ways. Telling us that contentment can be possible.

   

   xo

I think we’re entering an uncanny moment of what could be our evolutionary breakthrough (or breakdown). The threshold we once called ‘Anthropocene’, is now thinning into something else. Maybe our scientists already have a new term for this era, I don’t know, but I’d like to call it the ‘post-Anthropocene’ for now.

Is it just me or are most of us sensing new dimensions in our emotional landscape? Are you feeling something new that you can’t articulate yet? A hybrid kind of energy that oscillates between the rage of an unreconciled past and the ease, even seduction, of new modernity? What do we call this feeling that lives between crisis and possibility? And how do we learn to inhabit these emergent states in our interior worlds? Grounding, in such a moment, feels less like a practice and more like survival.

How do we steady ourselves when the world, and our own inner climate,
keeps shapeshifting?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since revisiting the Serpentine Gallery’s 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, a 2021 publication filled with poetic, practical antidotes for living through uncertainty. It gathers artists, ecological activists, and thinkers who gesture toward deeper modes of connecting to the planet, to each other, and to ourselves with renewed imagination.

It makes me wonder whether the urgent responsibility right now- for everyone- is to make new worlds. Make worlds upon worlds. Small, local, stubborn, joyful worlds that resist collapse through continual reinvention. Despite the dominant global narratives of fragmentation, I keep witnessing pockets of belonging forming everywhere, both on collective and individual scales. Hyper-local communities curating their own spaces of joy. Niche digital communities blooming like humble gardens. In the global South, communal lore is gathering momentum, especially as the once promising appeal of Western institutions has begun to let us down.

Simultaneously , there’s a movement among many of us to return to ancient wisdom traditions & practices of mysticism, breath-work, meditation etc that is rooting us back into our power, intuition and emotional resilience.

I think the real breakthrough comes when we can place belonging across the smaller scale of community to the vaster scale of planet.

Things are terrifying right now, yes. But they’re also strangely promising. A new world is not just lingering on the horizon, I can hear her breathing.

On that note, I wanted to share some meditations I’ve been practicing in my life lately to navigate the uncertainties of living during planetary changes. I hope this can help you in some way too!

1. For emotions that slip through the grip of your articulation, maybe it will help to give it a climate instead. Ask first, ‘what part of the world created this?’ If closing your eyes helps, visualise how this emotion truly appears as a landscape? How humid or temperamental is it? How calm or cyclonic? Maybe naming it after a hurricane, an unpredictable comet visitation, or an interstellar phenomenon gives it the weight of recognition you need.

2. Eat a juicy piece of fruit with a feral fervour, let it drip down your fingers and hands. Give thanks to the fruit.

3. Try to simplify something that is complex for you, without AI. Could be a piece of theory, philosophy, system or story. Then teach this to someone who is willing to listen. Reflect on the learnings made in the process.

4. Create a sonic compilation of ‘soft sounds’. It could be a playlist of nature sounds overlapping with Japanese ambient music or an assemblage of field recordings on your device. The point is to create a sonic toolset that nurtures your auditory senses to return to a state of softening. This is inspired from Pauline Oliveros’ book Quantum Listening, where she mentions how the devaluation of our sense of hearing due to ignorance has cause a serious imbalance in the quality of life.

5. Make an altar for the Earth. Let it collapse under natural forces.

6. Walk backwards very, very, very slowly. Have a friend around for support/protection. Quietly wonder about how slowness can be your ally.

7. Ask yourself: What does compassion look or feel like? What instances activate your compassion? Which moments prevent them from being allowed to surface?

8. Do nothing. Rest in your absolute creatureliness.

9. My guru taught me a simple but powerful meditation practice— when you stretch a word beyond its regular verbal cadence, it becomes eternal. It slips out of language and puts your mind in a meditative state.

   Take the word ‘Love’.

   Stretch it with your breath:

   Looooooooooooooooooveeeee…. (Keep going as long as your breath allows)

   Close your eyes if it helps you feel the word deeply. How does it feel?

10. Think spherically. (I’ll leave this to your interpretation)

11. For five minutes, watch something that does not move quickly:

    a shadow, a cup of water, the sky behind your window, an orange on the dining table. Let yourself lag behind it, imitating its pace. What emerges only when you’re slow enough to notice it?

12. Avoid hurrying to verbalise something. Let someone ask you a question, refuse to verbalise an answer immediately.

13. Imagine what productivity could mean to an indoor plant.

14. While walking on a busy street, put on your headphones and listen to river sounds. Notice how the two timelines meet.

Let me know if you try any of these out, and how it makes you feel :)

xo

I’m reminded of what Andy Warhol said in an interview: ‘I never read, I just look at pictures.’

While I identify with painting as my primary visual art practice, collage has been super foundational in shaping my composition skills and really thinking about how the language of figuration and abstraction meet each other. Working with found images is something I haven’t exclusively shared but my recent deep dive into my archives from 2019-20 brought up some really interesting works that I had completely forgotten about! Some images are excerpts from old zines I developed during Covid era (will write a piece on this separately), and some are loose explorations.

You may also discover the first inklings of my writing journey :))

xo

Hope you enjoyed this visual dispatch, the first of many more to come!

Thank you for supporting my work! 😊

R

2025 has been a year of psychological composting for me.

A lot of things in my personal and professional life suddenly plateaued, and got significantly slow. For someone who was used to a certain idea of progress & success, I was certainly caught in an upsurge of an emotional state that felt like a perpetual earthquake. At any moment, the ground could crack open.

Through my own journey of inner-work, I realised how this moment in time reflected back every insecurity, stiffness, unresolved anger and sorrow that has been unmet and unseen within me. Most of it surfacing from a hidden source, that silently heavy carrier bag of my obsolete belief systems and self-narratives.

This tendency in us is worth noticing: the ways we keep carrying our past into the present. We live our lives with an unconscious debt to our memories that we pay for by carrying out the same unhealthy patterns of doubt. In some way, we’re continuously resuscitating our older versions, desperate to keep them alive at all times. Because who are we without the stories we have used as method to survive our growing years? And I wonder why we can’t allow the past to gently rot in a natural process under the changing climates of our interior reality? We hold and react to every ache that resurfaces, and in doing so, it perpetuates. We continue to identify with our “brokenness,” as if it’s something that must be endlessly healed. But what if we could simply offer it away, let it rest like compost made of the organic excess that no longer serves us?

Maybe it’s time to lay down every fortress of identity we’ve built for ourselves, returning it to the soil to decompose, becoming nutrient-rich for something else to emerge. In this sense, composting is like an ecological alchemy.

The idea of composting has struck me as the perfect metaphor for how I want to navigate emotions I struggle with. I owe a lot to my meditation practice for this. Because no amount of therapy sessions or communal support will help unless you complete the circle by sitting quietly by yourself, unmoved, observing the mud swamp of your internal reality. Simply by observation, the movement of mind & the tightness of body begins to settle, like silt in a still pond, eventually disintegrating in the emptiness of spirit.

In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, there is a term for this kind of self-work: Svadhyay. Sva-adhyay or ‘self-study’. It's interesting how it literally translates into ‘self study', because it pertains to the objectivity of disciplined academic rigour. You study the mechanisms of your mind, your behaviours and thoughts without judgement or reactivity, with an acute sensitivity and attention to detail. It can be a slippery process in the beginning, but gets easier with time. In this process of paying close attention to yourself, you find the patterns beginning to shed on their own, decomposing and falling off the psychic armature.

In Princess mononoke, prince Ashitaka is sent on a journey to ‘see with eyes unclouded by hate’. This sentence really hit me especially considering how we often fail to do this when confronted with emotions & memories we’d rather look way from. A simple practice of visualising heavy emotions as a raw material for good compost can bring a lot of ease and resilience, a loving kindness towards all sensations that emerge from within us. Grief, anger, pain are perhaps the most nutrient rich excess that can be composted in the ground of your aliveness. Seeing all emotions and sensations like clouds is one aphorism, seeing it as compost can be another. Everything that resurfaces is met with, without judgment and laid gently on the earth, imperfectly, and left without interference to be made soil again.

Pick a story of any vegetation deity. They are gods because they know how to decompose, how to be eaten up by the earth to support the flourishing of her green subjects. In a Dionysian kind of ecstasy, everything that makes their body—everything defined as their personhood and godhood—is surrendered away.

Can we aspire to such a state of consciousness? Can we surrender our vacillating minds to the land? To let ourselves be remade by what receives us? Can we hold the grotesque truth of decay with the same tenderness we hold the promise of birth?

The saying ‘do what you can with what you’re dealt with’ holds true here. It’s compost methodology, in which I’d like to add: do what you can with what you’ve been given, and make purposeful use of all that is shed in the process. Life is circular that way, and we honour this cyclical principle even within our interior ecosystems. I gave myself the permission to become compost, following this circular scripture that Nature has written us all into. I allowed all the old versions of me I’ve kept alive so far along, to decompose before me, and I offered away the grief that followed too.

Perhaps giving ourselves this permission is the most healing thing we do for our continuity. In the context of the larger story of our planet, this is how love is preserved, and life’s momentum toward renewal is maintained.

xo

Thank you for reading! <3

1. I’m currently obsessed with Ruth Duckworth’s porcelain sculptures. That sensuous minimalism with bite and feminine appeal makes me think of what ceremonial technologies from the future can look like.

2. Kickstarter’s co-founder Yancey Strickler is onto to something. After Metalable, his team is working on an alternative social media platform (quite oxymoronic) which they call ‘Dark Forest OS’. I’m quite excited by this tbh.

3. Something to think about, over and over again:

   

4. It’s time for feral technology.

5. Sophie Strand offers a beautiful meditation on using our imagination to open our consciousness to more-than-human states of being.

6. If nothing is curated, how do we find things?

7. On quieter days, the pull of folklore becomes a return to a deeper purpose. Author Sharon Blackie’s talk on re-enchantment feels like a warm blanket for a sleep full of revelations.

8. John Baldessari’s ‘Four Events and Reactions’

   

   .

9. Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged #111415 (2015).

   

10. The notion of ‘enough-ness’ has been circling a lot on my mind lately, and coming across this short piece felt like no coincidence. Just like me, I hope it helps you soften and wake up to the reality of your own abundance.

xo

This time around, I’m keen to take a deep dive into what truly shapes the aesthetic lore of soft science fiction, drawing from a peculiar term I stumbled upon recently: ‘science-fixion’ - where narratives of the future are primarily oriented towards fixing the world.

In my ongoing visual research, I see soft science fiction as a sensuous marriage between tech and ecology. Creating an affective landscape of meditative leisure & connection, where consciousness turns from acceleration to attunement. The palette is aqueous and shimmering: fog tones, vapor gradients, resurfacing mineral strata, jellyfish transparencies, gelatinous mushroomings over ruined cities. A take on post-minimal eco-aesthetics, minus the sterility of western modernity’s gaze. With the tidal return of ancient wisdom, forms emerge less from extraction than from swelling, sprouting, unfurling—following the trail of Gaian eco-logics as well as erotics. Think of Maya Lin’s Wave Field or Brancusi’s Bird in Space, mythic, yet at the helm of a soft futurist upsurge in its ‘watery’ appeal. Think of Mariko Mori’s ritual technology installations, or Rajani Perera’s powerful works such as A Great Ship Came and Went that invoke the soft quality of resilience; Olafur Eliasson’s kaleidoscopic ecosystems as emotional infrastructure such as the Weather Project or Tunnel for unfolding time, Marguerite Humeau’s recoding of prehistoric mythologies through sophisticated rendering technologies, producing lucid forms that move between shamanic realms of spirit and (im)possible futures.

In the larger contemporary culture, soft SF has a strong presence, even if not often named as such. Perhaps it’s the intimacy of its scale that makes it all the more resplendent and niche. From the pastel melancholia in Spike Jonze’s Her, where sleek technology meets the eros of longing, to the vegetal shimmer and seduction of Annihilation; or the luminous alien-core translucencies of Arrival. Musicians like Sevdaliza, Björk, and Female Pentimento compose post-human yet numinous soundscapes that expand soft SF’s worldview into the auditory. And I cannot go without mentioning Iris van Herpen, whose tentacular couture was one of the earliest triggers for my descent into the soft sci-fi imaginary.

The aesthetic of soft SF delineates from the egoic desire for sharp, extractive geometries, replacing it with the generative + fluid dynamics of rhizomes, coral, climate, glacier or seed. It fuses the uncanny, sublime and inimitable vocabularies of embodied intelligence in both eco and techno. A design language that champions the ‘functional utility’ of vulnerability. Habitats for intimacy and cyclicality become the true monuments to futurity, building interfaces where human and other-than-human desires flow into each other like common tributaries.

The soft sci-fi palette leans toward translucence, materials that feel less like walls and more like membranes of breath and water (think aerogel), textural thresholds and spectral fields of light. Translucency, porosity, slowness are protocols followed as key design principles. Soft robotics, a field of research and development discussed extensively on scientist Laura Tripaldi’s Substack, reflects a new emerging aesthetic system for futurism, placing biological ergonomics and technology in often speculative atmospheres, disrupting the long-held idea of machines as just tools for labour and instead as poetic, “cosmological mirrors” and symbols for aesthetic reflection. Think of Anicka Yi’s non-human yet eerily familiar Aerobes, exhibited at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. In shows such as Soft Robots at the Copenhagen Contemporary, artists staged futures where the body is no longer a sealed unit but an osmotic membrane, pulsing and reaching out in a desirous fashion to unfold through relations.

Soft SF’s visual, philosophical, and material toolsets can sometimes also consist of ‘nothingness’ or space, such as Indian designer Bijoy Jain’s approach to using “void as material,” or Anish Kapoor’s large-scale bubbletecture projects such as Leviathan. Speaking of this self determining quality of matter (and non-matter), Laura Tripaldi writes about materials as active agents in the creation process. In her lecture on soft materiality at Columbia University, she mentioned: “In a soft future, our artefacts make themselves.”

All these radical approaches to form are really about crafting a niche emotional landscape of continuity and sustenance, valuing the aesthetics of abundance over doom. Such visual ecosystems place the idea of life-centric worldviews without succumbing to the fantasy of utopias. Materials, beings, and climates co-author futures of gentle repair, becoming a visual armature for the theory of science-fixion.

Thank you so much for reading! These posts come from my love for imagining softer, more possible futures for our world. I’m so glad you’re a part of this! I hope to bring forth more explorations like these in the future.

xo