A triptych of micro-collages based on The Ramayana. Titles and texts collaged from different translations of The Ramayana, including the 19th century version in rhyming couplets by Romesh C. Dutt and a contemporary retelling by Ramesh Menon. The series depicts Sita’s imprisonment in the garden of a demon-king. I produced this piece in 2016, while thinking about monstrousness, abuses of power, trauma and transcendence from different forms of captivity.

2” x 3”
Mixed-Media Collage and Oil on Linen.
Found texts and titles, collaged from various editions of The Ramayana.

A visual index of cliches. The series explores the strangeness of language by rendering common phrases into images, re-examining the most common and overused expressions by gathering them in a cabinet of curiosities. Terms of endearments in which the lovers devour one another, folktales and idioms that imagine mothers as monsters, a vast catalogue of sayings and slang that transform women into birds, and Freud’s dream language of symbolic objects in which everything is meaningful and nothing is as it seems.

7” x 9”
Mixed-Media Collage on Paper.