I’m drawing the parameters of this study as I move through it. Trying to follow–no, trust–a feeling I can’t see. Over the course of this week I plan to repeat a movement in hopes it will lead me to my body. I want to enter and reenter my body through feeling alone. Through repetition, I trace a pathway. Through repetition, I come up against my own limits.
3.18.24
Erika, on grounds:
I think my pithy take on a ground is, it’s the thing you push against or sometimes slide over and hopefully it’s not what you just fall into. But it’s always there and supporting you, whether you want it or not. It’s the gravity in painting.
1.15.25
I’m in the meditation room in the Amsterdam airport, on a layover to LA from Delhi. There’s a shelf with an assortment of spiritual books, and I open one called 365 Days for Travelers to the page with today’s date:
“I dare not stretch my legs in full at night, for the fear of putting my feet through the bottom of the ocean.”–Gujin Tushu Jicheng
11.13.23
I’m in my studio, trying to make sense of a feeling–no, a movement. It’s a curling inward or folding forward–a kind of gentle collapse, then a rising back up. I don’t know what to make of the position, but I can’t seem to escape it. In moments of pain, I double over into this position, overtaken by sensation. In moments of fatigue, I fold forward and rest. In this position I am held and also hold. I see, too often, how my mother, grandmother, and sister move, in their own ways in the shape of this movement. I line my floors and walls with rolls of butcher paper and lie on top. I dip my hands in water then red pigments from the prayer aisle of the Indian grocery store, and touch where my skin meets the paper, leaving marks on both. I move back and forth, between flexion and extension, making stops along the way to trace the positions in between. When I’m done, the floors and walls are lined with so many bodies that no longer feel like they’re mine.
10.04.24
I’m lying horizontal on the grass at the park, with bright pink deflated rubber balls under my neck and lower back, and a scrunched up sweater and stack of books under my knees. I gently lift my pelvis, then legs up to the sky. From my angle, I’m walking on the clouds. From yours, my legs are branches extending from my trunk. This started as a way to do physical therapy outside of my house, away from my roommate’s longing stares. But now my legs are antennas and they’re pulled towards the clouds. For a second, they come down, towards me. They like a stream flowing into–no, out of?–my crotch. Or maybe I’m coming up, into them. It’s disorienting here where the sky is beneath my feet, but I want to savor it. To hold onto this moment of alignment, of touch, for as long as I can. I want the clouds to be part of me and for me to be part of them. I want to get even closer, but I’m in a public park, and can’t take my pants off, so I whisper to the sky that I’ll be back.
2.20.25
I’m overly invested in the business of anticipating someone else’s pain. Always trying to intuit what might soothe them, based on what soothes me. Now we’re in the hospital and she’s waiting for a nurse to bring something for the pain. Something breaks, no-opens, in the place where my hand touches her inflamed hip. She tells me the pain coursing through her body is rerouting, skipping the place where my hands are. We’re both surprised by the immediacy of touch. The place where my hand touches her hip is a break, a threshold, a suspension of time that a body in pain demands. Through me, through her, a circuit is rewired. I’ve been here before, in this place where my own edges dissolve. I’m tempted to stay but I also know I risk losing my way back.
11.11.23
I keep abandoning and hiding the tracings on paper. They remind me too much of corpses, I think. There's a moment when they feel so alive, when my hand traces the edge of my body, when my skin touches the paper and the wet pigment anoints us both. For that brief moment, the paper and tracings become something else. Held together in tension, we need each other. But I lose something when I come back and try to show off what I’ve just made. I take scissors and start cutting along the overlapping lines. I immediately regret this and try to mend the cuts with different materials, threads, more paper, etc. but nothing sticks.
10.23.24
I move fast to get these cloud photos now, no longer starting from that horizontal place of a slow lift and release. I’m determined to take a photo and the conditions are limiting: the clouds must appear to be of my body; I need an open view, with minimal trees; and I must find the precise angle for my pelvis to align with clouds, which is tougher than I expected. I also can’t be near people, or I’ll risk arrest for indecent exposure. I get the shot, but make a mess of myself. My bag rolls down the hill and there’s burrs in my hair. My neck is sore from forcing the angle too hard. There’s smoke in the distance. A fire breaks out in the valley across the street from the valley I’m currently in. I’m far enough to be safe, but close enough to smell it. In the frame, there’s smoke coming out of me. Out of the frame, the smell gets stronger and my eyes are stinging.
1.6.25
I’m at a mall in Delhi, the same one I’d go to as a child, with my mother and this same group of friends. But now these friends are married and pregnant, and the pollution is so unbearable that I’m doubled over, breathless, and on the verge of collapse. Everyone around me seems to be unaffected and the dissonance is disorienting. I ask some workers if they can point me to a vent, but in my breathlessness I’ve forgotten the Hindi word for air. I make a wafting gesture, fanning my face, but they’re stumped. Another worker, notably the only other person wearing a mask, overhears me and leads me to a vent across the way. Why didn't you just say “hawa?”
3.3. 24
Triolet
I used a floor cleaner on my mirror
and my edges blurred in the cloudy haze.
I thought it might help me see clearer,
using a floor cleaner on my mirror.
One thing I didn’t remember
is how you still see me in my malaise.
When I use a floor cleaner on my mirror
my edges soften in the cloudy haze.
11.29.23
A sudden breeze knocks over a tiny yellow glass Ganesh that was my grandmother’s and it splits into two. This particular Ganesh, who is an elephant-headed god, has two faces, so there’s no clear front or back to the figure. It's called dvimukha ganapati, which means two-mouthed Ganesh and apparently represents his ability to see in all directions. I’m thinking of Jaishri, who shares a particular heartbreak with me, over our loss of India. Not that flattened diasporic longing for sweet mangoes, but a sharper pain of watching from a distance as our former home burns from within, fueled by its own hate. We long for a version of it that no longer exists and maybe never did. Jaishri went on to sculpt her own idols, making them queer, trans, and explicitly in opposition to the violence of Hinduism. I try to piece this broken Ganesh back together but it's been spliced and nicked in such a way that the halves no longer fit.
4.18.25
I practice moving while standing today. I feel exposed, moving without the floor or wall as my brace. I hold at my quivering knees. This is tiring and I’m tempted to stop. I press into and spread my weight across my feet, breathing into my pelvic floor. Eventually I find space between the quivers. At some point I sit, moving just my head and shoulder along the shape of the gesture. Then it’s just my head and I’m now rolling back and forth against the wall. I don’t know how long I’m doing this and can’t recall what happened in any kind of sequence. There’s another shift and I feel more awake and now I’m using my whole body again. I reach another limit and I want to keep going but don’t.
10.15.24
I thought about going faster until I couldn’t. Then I texted myself a list of things I need for the studio:
- Wrist braces
- Heat pad
- Place to stretch
- Air filter
- Massage balls - hard + the rubber air ones
- Electrolytes
- Maybe that mini humidifier here instead of at home?
- Large mat / pad for under my yoga mat to sit / work on things that I don’t care about ruining
With a broken piece of a blue oil pastel, I write: “BEING HERE MAKES ME WONDER: DO I LIVE TO MAKE ART? DO I MAKE ART TO LIVE? HOW DO I LIVE AND MAKE ART?”
4.15.25
I scatter broken shards of objects I loved from someone I once loved. I start moving and I’m thinking about all I need to do. I’m thinking about moving. Thinking while moving. I’m heavier on the floor today, hands pressed sliding supporting. My right arm swings around, and I’m pressed against the floor, moving in the shape of the gesture. That’s different than before. The floor is my brace and it vibrates from the speaker. What I want from this study is feeling increasingly clear and I know I’m not there yet, that place of feeling into my body. Embodiment is hard because it’s easy to get lost in there. After a nap, shower, and dinner, I come back to the space. I dip my hands in pigment and lean against the wall. Eyes closed I press into the wall, letting it hold me like the floor did before.
12.2.24
Annais messages me from the plane to Sydney, saying she didn’t get a window seat after all. Earlier, she made a map of her flight’s route moving west, and realized she’ll be traveling with the sun. The sun would rise from behind her from the east as she takes off early Sunday morning, then eventually surpass her, greeting her as she lands in the afternoon. It would be the longest sunrise she’s ever seen. When she lands, it’ll be her Tuesday afternoon, my Monday morning. You’ll be just a few hours ahead of me, she says, once you take out the monday and tuesday of it all. I tell her it’s like we’re running on a track. You’ve finished lap two (Tuesday) and are now just a few meters away from me on lap 1 (Monday). If we pretend it’s not a race, ignoring numbers and dates, then it’s almost like we’re running side by side.
4.17.25
This morning Valeria meets me in the gallery. We jump in tension as my cup of oatmeal falls over a crevice between the mats. We relax when it stays in the cup. Something about the thick slow consistency of this oatmeal, the way it surprised us by staying in the container feels related to the project, she points out. Later I’m moving on the floor again and lose sense of where I am in the room, how long I’ve been here. It’s a warm kind of disorientation. At some point tears rise and I stay with them until the feeling passes, then a kind of film forms over and through my body. Thoughts get quieter under this film. I’m teetering between sleep and wake and choose not to sleep but I’m not quite awake either. I’m moving, at a different scale and pace and texture now. My head and neck lead the movement and I’m curling extending upward and it’s smooth and there’s so much space in my thoracic and cervical spine. More space in my hips. At some point I get cold and wrap myself in a blanket. At another point my breathing gets heavier so I stop and breathe more and when I do I smile and surprise myself by laughing, there’s euphoria here. My head hits the wall and I’m surprised I’m here. My compass– light coming through the door, the red light from the lamp, Kishore Kumar playing from the speaker, and the large fan–are no longer fixed points that I move between. I’ve oriented to something else, something inside me. I want to be here longer. I’m startled when Julie comes, and it makes me smile, another feeling that I’m not ready to leave. I don’t know how to get up now. It’s like I’ve been interrupted in the middle of not a meditation, not an orgasm, not a dream, maybe something like a trance, but it’s much more of something else.