The Body and its Worlds — Inner or Outer

The Body and Its Worlds—Inner or Outer is an exploration of the layered consciousness, using dual tones to bridge the visible world with the invisible depths of the subconscious. Here, the “ultimate feminine” weaves our discarded selves back into the spirit, revealing that the divinity we seek is not a distant goddess, but the very hand that stitches our identity together from within.

While traditional iconography depicts Kali slaying the demon Mahishasura, here the battle is internalised. Mahishasura represents the egoic mind and its anxieties. The ultimate feminine form is not an “outer divinity” to be worshipped from afar, but the consciousness within us.

The act of stitching serves as an invocation of the breath, where the needle’s rhythmic mending transforms the site of puncture into one of perpetual healing. It shifts our perspective of labour into a quiet metamorphosis, weaving the discarded fragments of the self into a living divinity. Just as the body makes no distinction between the atmosphere it inhales and the vitality it sustains, the act of mending the self is rendered as a constant, involuntary necessity of existence. This process is articulated through the breath, a gift transported by a winged being to signify the infusion of universal life into the particularity of the individual. Furthermore, it explores the integration of the ancestral, wherein the feminine force incorporates “past selves” into the present. By reframing those traditionally perceived as “dead” as latent entities dwelling within an invisible realm, the narrative asserts that the past is never truly extinguished. Instead, it remains a vital, woven component of our identity, continuously transitioning from the ethereal back into the visible through the persistent labour of the soul.

It challenges the illusion of separation. Just as the phalanges of the fingers are distinct yet inseparable from the hand, and the hand from the shoulder, we are attached to the “complete body” of the universe.

At the top centre, we see a celebration of vitality, evocative of the primal energy found in Matisse’s La Danse. Figures are locked in a rhythmic dance of celebration, encircling trees that anchor the spirit to the earth. They exist beneath a red sky—a chromatic signifier of life, energy, fluidity, or blood. In this context, blood is a symbol of life in its most potent, flowing state, mirroring the rivers and forests that populate the terrestrial landscape.

A feminine figure holds a conch. It serves as both an acoustic and spiritual marker; as the figure blows the shell, it symbolises the release of the primordial breath that resides within her. This breath resonates, resounds, connects the mountains, rivers, and flora into a whole, suggesting that every element of the natural world is a manifestation of the same life force. From the smallest flower to the distant stars, everything is stitched into a living universe that breathes as one.

Seema Kohli, 2026