Mixed media · 2021Kuan — Main Panel
The well's mouth as wound and echo chamber of whispered prayers and absent water.
Kuan (The Well)
Mixed media on paper · 2021 — the well as architecture, metaphor and portal.
Mixed media · 2021
Mixed media · 2021Kuan — Panel 2
Surface scraped and layered like parched earth and crumbling masonry after Bundelkhand fieldwork.
Kuan (The Well) is a diptych that explores the well as architecture, metaphor, and portal — a vertical journey into water, darkness, and the subterranean. The works were created after extensive travel through the water-starved villages of Bundelkhand, where abandoned wells became monuments to failed monsoons and collective grief.
The paintings move between abstraction and figuration: the well's mouth as a wound, its depths as an echo chamber of whispered prayers and absent water. Using charcoal, ink, and handmade paper, the surface is scraped and layered until it mimics parched earth and crumbling masonry.
Kuan asks: what does it mean to draw water from a place that has forgotten how to hold it? And how do we mourn the loss of something we never learned to name?