Over the past several weeks, I've been thinking about why certain ideas continue to cycle through my work and how, over time, they became my visual vocabulary. Weight. Waveform. Grid. Relationships. Organization. While these ideas have emerged primarily through years of making, I've begun to recognize that they have deeper roots.

My way of seeing was fashioned from bits and pieces of cultural and dialectic influence from all kinds of people. From gurus to atheists and economists to scientists, all sharing ideas and generally staying much longer than the tea served with heated conversations never far from both religion and politics. They were simply part of the intellectual atmosphere in which I was raised. Those conversations quietly shaped the way I learned to think about the world. They explain why my work can comfortably hold physics, Indian philosophy, fiber, teaching, and making without feeling fragmented. They were never separate worlds to begin with; they were just the conversations all around me.

Years later, after studying fashion design, becoming an educator, and devoting myself to a studio practice, those early influences began to surface through materials rather than language. At the time, this was done through painting and collage. Now, through inherited sari silk, paper, wire, mirrors, and metal, certain organizational ideas kept returning: weight, waveform, the grid. They emerged repeatedly through the physical act of making, and only later did I begin to recognize the broader correspondences. I can now see that my work is the convergence of many lived experiences and the slow understanding that develops through sustained studio practice. 

During my MFA, I felt the need to prove my work through science and philosophy. Instead, I recognize those fields as parallel conversations. My sculptures do not illustrate ideas from physics or spiritual traditions. They arise from the place where a lifetime of experiences has become inseparable from the act of making.

After nearly three decades of teaching drawing and painting, I've come to realize that I haven't simply been teaching students how to draw. I've been teaching them how to see, and only recently have I begun to understand the depth of that lesson myself.

In drawing, we learn that nothing exists in isolation. Understanding comes through relationships. The subject becomes clearer within its context. Every line leads us to another observation; every shape exists in relation to another shape. Even when breaking down a complex subject into simple forms, things begin to merge; they blur into a perceptual reality, seen through connection.

I often tell my students, "That's a life lesson, we are all connected," or "That goes beyond this drawing." Because it does, and I'm sometimes surprised by how life makes so much sense in those moments, and the kids are looking at me as if I have ten heads as I extrapolate.

Drawing asks us to slow down and observe rather than rush to conclusions. It teaches us to notice relationships and understand that context matters. It asks us to tolerate ambiguity, to sit with uncertainty while trusting the process of seeing. In their struggle to get something "right," they tighten up. When I teach them to loosen up and allow for mistakes, they get so much better at seeing. The harder they try to control the drawing, the less they actually see. It encourages us to observe rather than assume, and to trust what we actually see instead of what we think we know. "Trust the process" becomes another life lesson. It extends beyond the drawing and into the practice of living as both observer and creator. I think this is why drawing can be so challenging: you have to allow.

Another thing I often encounter in teaching is students' fear of the dark. They hesitate to commit to the deepest values they observe. I remind them that without darkness, we cannot fully recognize light. Value gives form its dimension, and contrast allows us to see.

I continue to grapple with the darkness that exists in the world. Yet I wonder if part of being human is learning that, while we do not seek darkness, it can deepen our capacity to perceive light, revealing what is valued most. Without grief, love might not be recognized with the same depth. Without difficulty, compassion might remain unseen. I've heard many spiritual teachers say that it is through the "dark night of the soul" that you awaken to the light.

Perhaps this is what I have been seeking all along. My teaching practice has always been another way of exploring the same questions as my studio practice. For much of my life, I have searched for understanding as though it existed somewhere beyond me, just out of reach. What I continue to discover, both in teaching and in making, is that what I have been looking for is within me, and perhaps it always has been.

I had a realization while looking back at an earlier work, Matriarch, created in 2000 as part of my Master's thesis exhibition, Houses, at Teachers College. The body of work was made from paper and wire, materials I continue to use today. Looking at it now, I can see that I was already thinking about weight with its epigenetic and physical gravity.

At the time, I understood the Matriarch through my mother. She carried the family. Even though the weight in the piece is not placed directly on the figure's shoulders, there is a palpable sense of burden. The work was done to acknowledge her strength and the weight she carried. I realize that I am exploring weight today in relation to collective consciousness and how to distribute it. What has changed is my understanding of power.

In much of my recent work, weight is distributed across a network rather than concentrated in a single point. Nets, grids, and relational structures share a tension throughout as no single node carries the entire load. The strength of the structure emerges through connection.

The pattern repeats at every scale. I see it in my mother, who carried the weight of a family, and I see it in families, cultures, political systems, communities, and especially in ecosystems. 

I wonder where the weight resides and how it is held. I wonder now if this is also a different way of understanding the feminine, no longer expected to carry everything, moving towards a new structure in which no one has to. What once appeared to be individual strength can begin to reveal itself as collective support. Weight is shared. 

The work has been tracing the same questions all along. It simply took me twenty-five years to recognize them. In my work, I find that the personal and the systemic are not separate.

I’ve been thinking about my own consciousness in relation to the work.

I realize this is a larger understanding of why I have always made art that connects the self to something beyond it. I don’t make work only to illustrate an idea. I make work to figure something out.

I am a visual learner. An intuitive. This has always been my way of moving through the world. Over time, I begin to see patterns in what I’ve made. I see connections between experiences and artworks that once felt separate. What seems uncanny is actually a kind of recognition as the work has been tracing the same questions all along.

Both my experience and the work that comes from it are cyclical, but each cycle carries something forward. The spiral feels like the right form because I see the work circling back, but it never lands in the same place; it moves upward, outward, and inward all at once. There is always a moment of hesitation about whether to expand the work, and then I realize that it has to expand.

I begin to understand that the work happens as a response to my life and is helping me recognize what it is like to live it.

Writing alongside the work is part of the practice. It is a refusal to remain silent within structures that often favor neutrality and restraint. I write directly and unapologetically as an extension of the work.  

The introduction of fluidity into the grid is a formal shift and a rebalancing. The grid is modular and shifts between states of rigidity and fluidity, reflecting changing modes of perception and awareness. This fluidity allows what has been suppressed, even overlooked or dismissed, to enter the formal rigidity of the grid. This is where I locate the feminine and reclaim her power. Perhaps that is where and why my work exists: to reframe and reshape a narrative of art-making that has been controlled and defined by a select few.

The fluidity I’m working with is visual, and it's energetic. It lives in the space in between, the pause that allows movement to happen at all. It is the pulse that becomes the wave, that becomes the form. In energetic medicine, this is where change occurs, not in the fixed form, but in what moves through it.

It is the space between raindrops, as my husband, a doctor of Chinese Energetic Medicine,  Internal Martial Arts, and Daoist priest, says so often. The active void that allows. This is where I begin to understand power differently, in the ability to hold and move with what cannot be fixed, because change is guaranteed.

Wearing a sari never felt fully mine; it was something I cherished and adored, something inherited but distant, ever present yet once removed. The fabric held stories I heard, but not my own, and surely not mine to tell. In fiber, I find a language that is ancestral and immediate. By wrapping,  I finally get to embody this medium; as I wrap, I claim a connection that once felt out of reach. 

I tear to make meaning of a complex inheritance. The sari was always part of my cultural periphery. Too sacred to alter and too distant to wear without question. Tearing is disruptive and deliberate. It is a rupture in the quiet lineage of preservation and a claiming of space between belonging and becoming. In tearing, I break the spell of untouchable beauty, of unquestioned tradition. I wrap fiber the way a sari wraps the body, but here, the body is a reclamation. The wrapping becomes a gesture and a declaration of ownership, of becoming whole, or repairing epigenetic weight and transforming it, distributing it. I make space for the present and for my own transformation. For me, tearing and wrapping is a ritual of rupture and repair.

FIERCE
FIERY

WITCHING HOUR

HEALING PRESENT

DISRUPT TO HEAL
ERUPTION FROM DISRUPTION

IT IS NOW
IT IS HAPPENING NOW

MOTHER
SISTER
DAUGHTER
DIVINE FEMININE
DIVINE MASCULINE

THE TIME IS NOW
THE TIME HAS COME

MATRIARCHY RISES
MATRIARCHY HAS RISEN

SHE IS FUCKING PISSED

SHE IS FORGIVING
AND UNFORGIVING

THIS IS PARADOX

WE RISE WITH HER

SHE RISES IN US

I often find myself taking apart my own work; it had its moment, but it often continues to live. The past version of myself who stitched, painted, or collaged it together still pulses in the material and concept. I don't need the forms to remain fixed, so I inevitably return to them with my hands to dismantle and then remantle.

Lately, I’ve been considering time and how it reveals itself. I see the past, present, and future as layered, somehow concurrent rather than consecutive. They are echoes of one another: soft, and sometimes not so soft, but always persistent. Each moment holds the vibration of everything that came before, and all that is to come. So I spend time in the present, stitching slowly.

This slow stitching… captures? Holds hostage? No, those are too violent. But it does make you stay and continually asks you to focus on what is happening now.

When I take old works apart, I listen to my intuition. I remake them not to correct, but to commune. This is not recycling, it’s not even a transformation in the traditional sense. I somehow engage in a dialogue with time, past, present and future all at once.

The new work never retains the original form. My present self collaborates with my past self to shape what my future self will live as a new experience.

Today was a walk through time for me.

I visited the New-York Historical Society to see the exhibit The New York Sari, and it felt as though I had stepped into a room filled with ghosts from my past. A video showed a woman wrapping herself in saris, each style shifting with region, identity, and purpose. And just like that, I was transported upstairs in my mother’s room, watching her elegantly prepare for another dinner party.

The sari, one of the world’s oldest continuously worn garments, is at once profoundly feminine and steeped in cultural nuance. I always longed to wear one, but somehow, once I was of age, it never quite suited me. The traditional way: over a blouse and underskirt (petticoat), wrapped and pleated, then tucked into the waistband, six yards of woven, decorative, lush cloth. I went to the exhibit, half expecting to see a photo of my mother. She had been such a prominent figure in the South Asian community in New York, a founding member of several organizations, floating with grace down many South Asian parades.

Instead, I saw a sari belonging to her best friend, Sudha Acharya, founder of SACSS (the South Asian Council for Social Services). And then again, the memories flooded in.

My mother, Sushila Gidwani, was a refugee from Sindh during the Partition. During this traumatic time, the family’s business collapsed, and she became the breadwinner, which granted her a rare kind of autonomy. She chose to leave India and came to the United States alone to study, first to Minnesota, and then to New York, where she built a life full of energy, friendships, and intellectual ferment. Gurus, doctors, professors all came to our home and many times stayed. It was a bohemian salon. I remember the saris, the shimmer of ornament and color, the warmth of gatherings as I hid beneath the sofa, watching the parties unfold. Conversations, arguments, laughter. Always ideas in motion.

In the exhibit, two inspiring artists: Suchitra Mattai’s She Arose (from a pool of tears) and Chitra Ganesh’s Sultana’s Dream prints. One panel of hers in particular struck me, a depiction of sandaled feet (chappals), posed in a way that mirrored an early painting I made of my own foot, years ago, at the start of my artistic journey. I remember how much I came to love my feet through that painting; those feet, strong, powerful, and grounded, are my mother’s feet, I realized later. I referenced that painting in her eulogy, seeing clearly how her strength lives on in me.

Tears welled up, but they weren’t just from sorrow; they came with a heart full of blessings.

I emailed Sudha this afternoon. I’ll be visiting her and the beautiful work at SACSS very soon.

Addendum (April 2026)
After writing this reflection, I reached out to the New York Historical Society to share about my mother’s history and her influence on my work, particularly through the material of the sari. I’m grateful that this was received and included in the exhibition. Her presence now exists within that space, even if briefly. I am so grateful, and my heart is full. She was also a Gandhian economist and scholar, whose thinking continues to shape my understanding of the world.

This might be uncomfortable to read. It’s uncomfortable to write. But I’ve been thinking a lot about disruption, not just in art or healing, but in the world. And I keep coming back to this truth: sometimes, we must disrupt to heal.

My own healing didn’t begin in earnest until I understood this. I had to experience something deeply disruptive to realize that something had already been broken in me. Only by facing it head-on, honestly, could I begin to process it, transform it, and eventually use it for my own growth. Disruption, I’ve learned, is often the first step toward meaningful change.

This insight mirrors what’s happening in the broader world. Disruption, especially at the scale we’re witnessing globally, acts like a mirror. It reflects everything we’ve ignored, suppressed, or justified. And to truly transform, for society to become something more just, equitable, and sustainable, we must walk through discomfort. There is no real change without it.

This brings me to something controversial, but I’ll say it anyway: as much as I despise the current regime in America and the orange criminal at its center, and all the damage he and his enablers have done and continue to do, I sometimes wonder, was this level of disruption needed? Was this the jolt required to reveal just how broken the system has always been? It was this very system that created him and those like him.

In my view, he is the embodiment of the seven deadly sins. A grotesque caricature of greed, pride, wrath, and corruption. But perhaps that’s the point. He doesn’t just represent a man; he represents a mirror. One we all have to face. He reveals the shadow in ourselves, in this country, and in the world.

This is a lesson. Will we pass? I believe we can. But only if we stop pretending there’s some “normal” we can return to. That illusion was never real. “Normal” was a myth built on exclusion, inequality, and denial.

To move forward, we must reimagine everything, from how government serves the people to how we collaborate across borders to ensure human survival. The planet doesn’t need us. It will regenerate with or without us. The question is...will we evolve quickly enough to still be here?

This is where I land today: disruption is not the enemy, it is the invitation. The more we resist it, the more painful it becomes. But if we face it with honesty and courage, healing, real healing, becomes possible.

In Hindu philosophy, this truth has always existed. The goddess Kali is not a figure of comfort; she is a force of reckoning. A wild and always fierce embodiment of death, rebirth, and truth. She destroys illusions so that something honest can rise. Growing up, I was afraid of her. I clung to Laxmi and Saraswati, goddesses of beauty, abundance, and wisdom. They felt safe.

But now, I understand: Kali is not here to be feared; she is here to be honored. She is the disruption we need to face what’s broken and to allow new growth to occur. She is the blade that cuts through the lie of “normal.” She is the mother who says: WAKE UP!

Perhaps the world is finally listening.

I’ve always been drawn to old gates. Ornate window grilles. Corset boning. Bird cages. The repeating grid lines in my older work. The way a fence or a net lets you see through but not enter. It creates a relationship of distance, of longing.

Lately, I’ve been making lace, learning needle lace properly for the first time. And of course, it’s a net too, a delicate one. A web of labor, repetition, and time, and it feels familiar, like something my hands have always wanted to do, and my eyes are always drawn to.

Why do I keep returning to these structures? Why this impulse to look through?

Maybe it's a kind of witnessing. A need to observe, to understand, without stepping too close. Or maybe it’s about protection, having the choice to stay behind the veil. But these forms also offer beauty, order, and connection. I wonder if this is also about feeling separate from something ancestral, emotional, or cultural. 

This is the space I’m working in right now. Not the thing, but the space between the thing and the viewer. The through.