An open studio and residency working on the architectural glass of the newly constructed Z9 Creative Industries building. Each glass panel became a site for individual but interlinked drawings using acrylic paint, glass mark pencils, and pastels. The drawings were automatic, gestural, detailed, expansive and experimental. They flowed between anatomical, patterned, floral, observational, and works of historical Kantha.

I was weaving lines, colours, emotions, and memorialising my mother's passing, and in mourning, gently wiped each mark to leave behind spectral presences on sparkling clean glass. I was reflecting on cycles of life and eventual passing.

I imagined my Kantha drawings were gently conversing with and cloaking the (glass) skin of the building at QUT. Over three weeks, I worked in contemplative performativity, creating automatic drawings in an ample lobby space, stopping to converse with students, academics and staff using the premises. Over cups of tea and home-baked orange cake with artist friends, writers, and my son, discursive topics flowed. I journeyed daily and nightly across the glass panels, watching the drawings grow in cyclic time, accompanied by reverie and the soft breeze and movement of leaves outside the building.

The paintings stimulated the surface of the glass, spilling over to the sides and adjacent works, defying constrictive containment to place, time, and specific meanings. The sun streamed in and reflected colours on the floor and the far walls, and I peered at the Moon through apertures at night.

My mother’s saree, which I draw on when travelling, was suspended and became an embodied presence in the morning light, airing the haptic and the marked. A shrine nearby with freshly collected bark, incense, family photographs, and my Guru: Anandmayee Ma.

At the end of the year, celebratory shows occurred amidst flowers, wine, and platters of food freely shared, oblivious of the upcoming pandemic and the silence that followed.