THE FLOW STATE
This is a hymn to the body’s quiet
war- not the blood, but the (un)becoming.
The body is an alchemist. It turns
pain into poetry, blood into paintings and collapse into rebirth.
These menstrual composition are a
visual liturgy in the images of language and fibre. The menstrual cycle unfurls
into a metamorphosis.
Here, the watercolour blooms like a
bruise, its pigments seeping into paper grain memory like bone, while the
thread stitches itself into the narrative: sometimes structure, sometimes
shackle, always a witness.
The compositions sway between
suffocation and rebellion. The watercolour’s translucence betrays every mistake
while the thread insists on agency, a hand pulling taut, a knot refusing to
slip- yet unspooled, between surrender and control.
Lucid State
The body sleeps, curled like a
question mark. A split lullaby. The self, watches, free yet tethered by the
thread that has stitched the phantom to the flesh in infinite cycle of
unravelling (shadow of thread). Pacifying the pulse before it mutinies.
Chrysalis
The bathwater is a lukewarm shroud.
The thread loops lazily, one end free like a lifeline, the other leading beyond
the tub to another state. It’s a ritual: sink until the body forgets its
borders, let the water blur the line between waiting and drowning. The hot glue
stains are not flaws but fossilised imperfections, the body’s ultimate refusal
to be immaculate even in the remaking. The body is an archive of repairs. It
learns to dissolve without disappearing.
Craving
The thread’s asymmetry mirrors the
dialogue of the body with hunger -two parts discipline versus one part
unravelling. The floor is littered with artifacts of the body negotiating with
its own cravings. The feet move on not in defiance but resignation, the loose
stich a gambit.
Is it a promise of control or just an illusion
of choice?
The food insists more than it fills.
Fracture
The mirror shard is a scalpel and
the thread is suture. The sharp-edged reflection dissects the labour of beauty
while the thread binds it to performance. The grip maps how the habit etches
itself into flesh. The thread’s infinity loop is a closed circuit where pain
and upkeep fuel each other.
Unhousing anatomy
The pelvis, often a silent scaffold,
becomes an altar where identity is forced to roost. The thread implies a prior
attempt to hang itself, but it’s cut and frayed ends suggest futility. By
lodging the head in the pelvis, the image inverts the body’s hierarchy:
intellectual subjugated by the mechanical. The missing limbs compound the
claustrophobia- no means to flee or fight, only to occupy.
Dissolution
The torso is a collapsed axis and
the limbs are splayed out in disrepair. The decaying wings carry the weight of
unrealized flight. The red thread is less about growth and more about
entropy.
What sustains us when the body
becomes a rumour of itself?
Suture
The thread here is not stitching
shut but through and out- a refusal to erase the scars.
Healing is both anchor and release.
Elza
S Vempeny is a student of BA English Literature at
Shiv Nadar University, interested in photography and mixed media.
