Artist Statement

Poetess of Nature

Once, while walking in a garden with a friend, we discussed the difference between creation and imagination. He told me:

“For creation, you don’t need knowledge. You just need to catch it. For technique, you might need knowledge. For creation, you need silence. Creation that comes from the mind is imagination.”

This teaching has stayed with me. The more deeply I connect with myself and the world around me, the less conceptual my art becomes. I rarely know what I am creating in the moment. Only later, looking back, do I begin to understand. Art, to me, is a mirror of life — reflecting the state of mind, or the state of no-mind, of its creator.

For a long time, I felt I had to choose between spirituality and my artistic career. I explored different paths, from Vipassana and yoga to shamanism, Hindu traditions of tantra, and the Naga order of Avahan Akhara, into which I was initiated, while carrying my Christian background with me. I came to recognise how different traditions, rituals, and beliefs can express what feels like the same truth in different languages. My relationship with nature became the thread connecting them all.

I feel nature. I listen to her and respond as best I can. This is how I praise her. I am beginning to understand that bringing spirituality and art together is not a compromise, but my way.

My artistic practice extends beyond the objects I create. It lives in community work, seva — selfless service — and in the everyday experience of forests, rivers, the land, family, elders, little children, animals, and flowers.

It also lives in the absence of a home, in nomadic life — something I feel deeply, perhaps inherited from my ancestors. There is a particular pain in belonging nowhere and everywhere at the same time, and a sense of loss that comes with finally accepting that perhaps there is a way for me after all.

The way I choose to live becomes an artist statement — a performance not staged for an audience, but lived every day. My Guruji once told me that even when nobody is watching, the sun is there, witnessing everything during the day. And when the sun goes to sleep, the moon takes over, watching through the night.

At a time when nature is so often treated as property and its resources exploited, choosing to live in relationship with the Earth becomes an act of resistance. Perhaps this is one of the highest forms of art: learning how to live beautifully.

Trends and ideas of beauty change, but the sincerity of a moment can be felt instantly. When something is true, there is an ease to it. Perhaps art begins there — in the silence that allows something greater than the self to emerge.

I am no longer searching for a place to belong. I am learning to listen rather than impose, to serve rather than possess, and to create without needing to control what creation becomes.

Perhaps my spiritual path is not to become a monk. Perhaps it is to become a poetess of nature.

To offer my hands to the Earth and allow her to speak.

As J. Krishnamurti writes in Education and the Significance of Life:

“For the true teacher, teaching is not a technique; it is his way of life, like a great artist.” (p. 111)