Animals and the stories that carry us into their mysterious inner worlds have always captivated me. Scientific, ecological, animistic and mythological animal stories all hold imaginative power, acting as bridges of empathy that expand my world and perception beyond the mundanely human. Image-making is my active participation with these stories, in which acts of imagination and contemplation test the boundaries of where one "self" begins and ends in relation to another. Art becomes a method for my sensing interdependence across species, time, and scale.

This process becomes disorientating the more one meditates on shared DNA, atoms, waters—and even more so when the other "self" in question is, for instance, the birth of a universe, a collective dream, or the unfathomable force of evolution. This disorientation is generative for me, and my work is designed to bring viewers into this space. There is a gulf between us and our non-human kin that is filled with mystery, cruelty, curiosity, anthropomorphism, othering, and metaphor. I’m interested in how art can be used to sensitize us to alternative ways of viewing intelligence and interconnectedness. Art can subvert or bypass the lens of objectification and human supremacy that plagues our observation of the more-than-human world. To contemplate the depth of our entanglement with the living world is to see reality as enchanted.

Research into myth, symbolism, and art from the Global South plays an important role in my work, especially as someone whose own ancestral traditions of culture, ritual and storytelling have been obfuscated by generations of migration and familial breakage. I’ve been educated in western ways of painting, but my practice grows from the roots of South Asian painting traditions, including tantric lineages that prioritize visualizations and mantras, and which use art as an expression of scientific and human physiological insight.

This inheritance influences how I think about perspective and narrative, as well as the way I articulate space within the picture plane. My works are built slowly over time, often beginning from a process of writing that charges the space of a painting in a certain direction, giving it energy, velocity, and rhythm rather than a specific narrative. Layers of text, drawing, and paint are built up until each piece has its own histories of thought and process, fossilized like sediment building in the earth’s crust over time. I also take my vocabulary of materials from South Asian lineages of painting, including South Indian techniques of gold leaf and rhinestone application, that add to the composition and topography of my works.