I'm trying to make sure that the visual connections between the disparate elements are strong enough for the viewer to keep moving through the work. It's in paying attention to those hundreds of details that the flow of the line will guide an audience through the narrative in a way that will make them enter it enough to engage with it, and perhaps construct their own narrative.

The having of the ideas is quite otherworldly. And then the making of the art itself is quite scientific. It's a combination. L Doing figurative work or taking pictures, and looking at how light actually reflects and refracts on bodies, or how your perception of something changes based on distance. But I think the getting of the ideas, and having that space to just have the ideas, is otherworldly, and requires a clear mind.

It's interesting to think about connecting the dots within an archive in a different way than linearly or teleologically. It's a great delight to make art or use language or just have ideas, and put them together in a very unexpected way. Art gets categorized historically, geographically, by medium, not necessarily by concept or repeating imagery, or feminism or femininity.

I'm interested in representation that falls outside of what would be socially appropriate, or acceptable, or beautiful. The world is going through a very fundamentalist moment. You have right-wing politics and misogyny and religion employed together everywhere - here in the US, with issues like abortion. Religion is a very fraught and complicated topic, but at the same time, like all grand historical narratives, there is a potential for challenging, or rethinking the kinds of subjectivities that these meta-narratives produce.

I'm more interested in moving toward writing stories - thinking about the graphic novel form, and just something more long-form. I did a lot of literary translation in college. Translation is an art. But for sure writing has always been a part of how I think through my ideas.

All existing art was religious until perhaps a hundred years ago. Within that there's obviously been lots of room for manipulation. I think that's because our current religion is capitalism. Capitalism has the functions of patronage, commissions, control of content, bestowing of space, elevation of certain artists over others based on how much they pander to people in power, the determination of value of the work, all of it. Capitalism commissions artwork now, the market.

I think that in the diaspora, and among immigrants, religion becomes a vehicle for the transmission of cultural information, and cultural codes, and this does end up re-inscribing certain things about the religion - like caste. Caste discrimination and hierarchy are still a very fundamental and violent part of Hinduism. My family was upper caste, and that was very clear. I feel like caste and religious practice are inextricable, actually.