Artist’s Statement: Mandala
Mandala, 2021. Collage with personal artifacts.
I Am
I am of the earth and its elements.
A scale swinging between order and disorder,
A strange complexity of controlled and uncontrolled forces,
An intricate interweaving,
A synergy of elements,
A continuum of alignments, movement, and evolution -
An experience of feelings, meanings, and memories.
My first experience with mandalas were in my childhood living in India and traveling to Tibet. I was especially enchanted by the spiritual mandalas in Tibet, created by dyed grains of sand, which took monks countless painstaking hours to create. As a child, it confounded me that these beautiful creations were meant to be ephemeral – that they were wiped off and blown away into the wind or released into the river, back into nature. But after time, as I grew older, I understood that dismantling the mandala, had in itself, a profound meaning – symbolizing the impermanence of all that exists – material and immaterial, and especially human life.
I planned this mandala for a long time. I wanted to create something that had deep meaning for me personally. I was of course profoundly inspired by the mandalas that I saw in Tibet, but I did not want to make a recreation or make an attempt at emulating something that is scared. I wanted to reflect on myself as a whole, what would represent my core, what would be a representation of how I am. I had to select my materials carefully. Moving away from the materialistic, in line with the temporariness of life, the idea that the mandala should be made with found objects resonated with me. While I did consider using natural objects, I wanted my finished product to have a more intricate and controlled look. I brought out my box of old magazines and brochures (these are a great source of inspiration, reminders, and visual prompts for me) and started collecting and cutting out images that drew me in. Nature, for me, is the most profound source of inspiration. Nature is where I am from, where we are all from. We are part of nature, and for me, there is nothing truer than that. Natural forms and their complexities seem to reflect in our lives as well of course. The seemingly disorderly forms, organic shapes, combined with the geometric patterns, fractals, Fibonacci sequences, symmetries, and images that look disorganized up close but from afar becomes repetitive and systematic – seem to represent human lives. The perpetual changing of nature, growth, destruction, and evolution, seem to correlate to human life, and my life. I chose images of root vegetables to symbolize our rootedness in nature. I chose images of seeds to symbolize all of our potentials as living beings. I chose images with distinct patterns – the centers of sunflowers, the Romanesco broccoli, cauliflower, fennel, lettuces. I found an image of a sculpture that reminded me of infinity – in the way that there were lines in different directions but they were connected and continuous. I found images of gold colored flower sculptures – gold being the color of enlightenment in Hinduism and Buddhism, the color universally associated with the sun, which without life would not exist. I found images of the ocean, which symbolizes the beginning of life, chaos and order at the same time. I found an image of a sculpture of an eye, which symbolizes omniscience and the gateway into the soul, and moral conscience, in green – the color of life. I arranged these images on a round cardboard cut from a box, in a circular pattern, as mandalas traditionally are, to symbolize totality and timelessness.
After I was finished assembling the images, I looked through my art materials and found golden seahorses and clear spheres – these are things that I’ve collected during my years in Chicago – and they are more than 20 years old. The 7 translucent spheres against the images, that look like reflections of mini worlds, are meant to symbolize the 7 chakras – root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown. The 4 golden seahorses symbolize the cardinal directions – north, east, south, and west. Seahorses also symbolize strength and luck, which have been two important driving forces in my life. On top of the eye in the middle, and the image of the chandelier that looks like a crown, I included a peacock feather. This was collected during my childhood in India, and is at least 30 years old. By including these personal, aged artifacts into my mandala, I felt that I was able to connect deeply with the mandala and make the piece complete.
Making this mandala was a very grounding and reflective experience for me. I thought about how everything in nature may seem disorderly but how there is order if you look carefully and notice the patterns, and how there is order too if you look from afar, from far above – like looking down onto an ocean that from afar looks calm and even – but up close is full of sounds, movements, and life. I felt that life in general, and my life included, is the same way. Life is a continuum of moving parts, organization, learning, and continuation. It made me think of my journey of becoming an educator. I didn’t always know that this was my path, but it only started to reveal itself to me and make sense as my life changed and I evolved. It also made me think of the continuous balance that I have to keep as an educator and as an artist and mother. Everything in life needs balance. Life needs variety and learning, and new experiences, but it is important to keep a balance and keep one’s directions and maintain a sense of peace and harmony in whatever one does. I felt that this mandala accurately captures this idea that there is order in chaos, harmony in variety, and heightened meaning in the everyday or the known.
I am very happy with how my mandala turned out. I am really glad that I did not pursue the path of trying to create or emulate a traditional mandala. I did not even contemplate such an idea because I was not interested – but if I had, out of feeling that I needed to, it would have turned out to be an unfulfilling project and I probably would not have felt gratification from the final product. This project took a long time to think of. I kept on looking for visual stimuluses and inspiration to strike, and it took a long time. All I kept on thinking of, and being drawn to, were images of nature. Then the thought of making a collage of images from nature to represent the idea of continuum and order within disorder and meaning within chaos, and continual growth among centeredness, came to thought, and I started creating. My biggest challenge was moving away from what I thought would be expected of me – moving away from creating a mandala that looks obviously like a traditional mandala. Another challenge was to have faith and have patience during the process. The process of cutting out images and arranging them, took surprisingly long, but I continued to have patience and faith in my vision, because I had spent such a long time coming up with the idea of it, and because I was working with things that represented something that resonates with me very deeply – nature.
