As I navigated the journey the series of gratitude was taking me on, I began to appreciate the vaster things we never acknowledge. The esoteric laws of physics, forces like gravity & electromagnetism & others yet undiscovered that took shape after the big bang and made possible the unique string of events that made my life possible. I trembled at the thought that if a single one of the beads in this string, 13.8 Billion years old, have been different, life as we know it would never had existed. I bow in gratitude to this incredible journey that our universe traversed to make it possible for me to experience this life, albeit for a period less than the blink of an eyelid in the grand scheme of things. I wonder at the simultaneous boundlessness (on a human scale)and insignificance (on the universal scale) of this planet earth, the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ as Carl Sagan described her.

Then my mind swooped down to the minutiae, the incredible complexity of our bodies, the organs that keep us going, the muscles ligaments & tendons that make us, the delicate veins and arteries that fuel every part of us, the skin that binds them all into a gorgeous, misshapen bundle, the cells that tirelessly & anonymously work to keep us ticking and finally the DNA which makes each of us the unique snowflake that we are.

 I realize I have a lot to be grateful for, and these works of mine are just a speck of the tribute that we ought to place at the feet of what we call mother nature, a grossly insufficient term to describe the unimaginably vast cosmos, from the infinitesimal to the infinite. I intend to juxtapose both these aspects of life into my work in this series, aiming to capture the essence of life itself. By painting over a collage of torn fragile handmade paper sewn onto to soft mulmul fabric by thread-work I want to convey concurrent fragility and complexity of human life.