Day 11-19 Eight days of looking back at myself

Have you seen Jojo Rabbit?

Elsa, the Jewish girl is hiding in a cupboard. The cupboard is dark and stinky. She is separated from her family and her love. Perhaps, she has lost her family and with the spite and anger diverted at her community, she is living through a loss that is almost unimaginably suffocating.

She is but a teenage girl, in the prime of her life and the world around her is crumbling down to pieces she can’t pick and make sense of.

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Children assume love to be the default mode of the world around them - their mothers loved them enough to not let them die of negligence and their fathers loved them enough to be around as an additional care taker and this normalcy of feeling, when tested tears to shreds the model of the world they’ve been weaving all along. Hate must literally destroy our cells, I believe. Was it destroying Elsa’s cells too?

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When you can’t hold onto anything, what do you hold onto?

Hold onto that thought. Being stuck at home isn’t the best thing to happen for me in the last one week - and in between work, cooking, washing dishes and washing more dishes, I am more irritable and tired as usual. It was surprising when I started looking back at my selfies from two years back.

It seemed a distance of a lifetime had to be crossed between that girl and the woman I am now. I seemed to be holding onto dear life - and barely so. I decided to walk the steps of these two years to meet her again - between today and that day. To hold onto her.

This is how the meeting went.

Day 4-10 Six days of drawing and collecting shiny confetti from the universe

A week flew by in the haze of news of Corona virus infecting the world’s blood streams. Fortunately, I was able to snatch enough time during my days to put my pen to paper everyday to make something that came from a deeper place.

I’ll be putting up some of the completed drawings up on the home page directly. Here are seven drawings I made in the last five days.

There is a story about a shiny confetti in this post.

During travels, it is impossible to pack along a long list of stationary items. I have also observed a long list of stationary items, even if packed, are instead a hinderance to creating something in pockets of time one gets while travelling.

In order to invoke the merciful goddess of creativity-under-constraints, I only packed a black notebook, two white ink pens, an adhesive tape and a glue stick.

On the first day of my stay while walking to the beach, I saw amongst the organic debris of twigs, dried leaves and tree bark, a shiny glittery coin shaped object bouncing off the Goan sunlight. I looked closely to confirm that it was a piece of shiny confetti that must have floated off by the wind and deposited in this absolutely random point. I thought to myself, oh, it’ll fly off by the time I am back - the wind will take it off and I’ll never see it again.

That didn’t happen.

I saw it wedged firmly on the sand the next day too. This time, I picked it up considering it a bright, shiny, glittery gift from the universe - a gift for my sketchbook. I pasted it on one of the pages and admired how it reflected the light as it sat firmly on my sketchbook.

Guess what happened the next day?

As I walked to the beach with my sketchbook and stationary pouch, I saw another one of this confetti landed just a few inches from where I found its sister the other day. I looked at, smiled and picked it up to paste it on another drawing.

The next day, I found another one, another one the day after that and another one the day after that!

For everyday I drew, I found this confetti waiting for me to pick it up, to be stuck along nicely in one of the drawings.

Today, as I checked out and walked towards the exit, guess what I found! Two confetti circles this time! Locked up in the same position, reflecting the Goan sunlight, hidden enough from the prying eyes of kids yet visible enough for my peering eyes.

Those two drawings are yet to be made. I’ll update this set of drawings here as a notebook.

Thank you universe, for sending me a reminder of a treasure everyday can hold — only if I look closely and have the courage to claim it for myself.

Day 2+3/366 Balacing stones and painted beads

I saw a video about balancing stones first from Jonna Jinton - a Swedish photographer and artist who moved to a small village in Sweden that has 10 inhabitants. I have spent quite a many evenings after work and quite a many mornings with her videos getting inspired by her.

I have a small collection of stones of interesting shapes and colours from different beaches I’ve visited. They’ve been wrapped in various bags and kept in the recesses of various drawers so far. I decided to revisit them and see if I could change their form into something else.

So I did. Used a few drops of a fast glue and made these three tiny sculptures mimicking balacing stones.

On day three, I dusted my collection of wooden beads that I was quite fascinated with some years ago and decided to paint them to make necklaces. Turns out, I still enjoy the process of painting those beads tremendously. Sadly, I didn’t have any string to string them on and had to steal from the burlap string that my cat plays with (Sorry Orbit :P)

I have a feeling I’m going to go in the rabbit hole of making these necklaces again!

Now, I have to rack my brains on what to make for today! Off I go :)

Day 1/366 Embroidery Loop

I am sitting in the lotus position today, dutifully reporting on the first day of the Year of the maker rat. Before I start the day’s reportage, I just happened to browse through the Julie/Julia project to make a comparison of our projects (You’ll know me through this, I am competitive in weirdest of ways)

Julie Powell started on a similar project of cooking through 524 recipes in 365 days! Considering I’ve picked a similar number, I realise how utterly daunting this task is - however, I also am able to drive some strength from the fact that Julie was indeed able to finish her project.

What is harder? Making 524 recipes or making 500 arty things? We’ll only know with time.

For now, I call upon the compassion of this mother of yearly projects to bless me with the strength and tons and tons of ideas to make!

Now for the reporting, yesterday, I finished making this embroidery loop. I had started working on this over the last weekend and this was left unfinished when I squeezed a trip to Delhi and back. In the evening though, as I was surrounded by friends passing on information on the newest vegan protein powders, my hands kept moving in a state of trance to finish this piece.

* Year of the maker rat *

For reasons completely inappropriate to mention here - I have thought of making 500 art things this year. In any shape or form! Also, to be completely open hearted and sending them off in the world (hopefully not dispatch it to my mom).

I am known to myself as the girl who is extremely fond of keeping lofty goals and then kind of scoring a 60-70% - which she then justifies as failing honorably than not starting at all.

I have no clue how on earth have I got this insane 500 number! If this year ends the same time next year, I have 366 days (leap year yay!) to make 500 art things.

Knowing very well in advance of my historical failures in keeping up with these resolutions on social media, I have decided to just keep writing here (because no one is going to be reading my blog) and if I indeed realise the utter stupidity of this venture, I can crawl here one late night and delete the half baked 2.5 posts I would have posted.

It is 2020, the year of the metal rat - in the spirit of adhering to the theme, let’s call it the year of the maker rat - shall we?