In this layered drawing, an outline of pressed bell-shaped flowers of Cornish heather, a museum card file with original Blum label of specimen no. MIN.058430, and a drawing of Cassiterite mineral sit together - asking what happens to topographies once they have been rummaged empty, layers of sediments displaced, and the shiny contents amongst them displayed.

Tin, one of the earliest metals known to humankind, has been mined, smelted, and traded in Cornwall for thousands of years. Its main ore mineral is cassiterite, a dense black material that occurs in veins on the edges of the region's granite moorlands. Cornwall was one of the first regions of Britain to de-industrialize with the gradual collapse of its mines starting in the mid-nineteenth century. Small scale mining however continued in Cornwall until the 1990s, and has left a long-lasting legacy of contamination throughout the Cornish landscape: ruined engine houses and chimneys, derelict industrial land, soil and water contaminated.

In this work, two elements - a dried flower of heather and museum label of the mineral - partially eclipse and divert the eyes away from the mineral. These refer to the thick, overgrown blankets of beautiful heather flowers and distinctive wildlife ecologies that now cover Cornwall's contaminated estuaries and its immense spoil heaps

This artwork is a part of the series - 'Out of Place' which was born of a mineralogy project made in collaboration with the Yale Centre for British Arts. The project looks at 10 minerals from the collection of Yale Peabody Museum as objects that have travelled in time as matter - formed by weathering, precipitation, heat and pressure, volcanic eruptions - but also as objects that have traversed our world as migrants. These drawings trace the colonial aspirations, curiosities of those in search of novelty and admiration of nature as forces that continue to move matter. In this project are Diamonds from Kimberly mines of South Africa, Apophalytie of Bhor Ghat railway tunnel construction site in India, Meteorite from Namibia, Graphite in Sri Lanka - sites where the dreams of a few moved the earth beneath others.

This project shape-shifted from being an in-person inquiry to an online exercise due to the first Covid-19 lockdown. Amid the political chaos that was unfurling all around us and the death toll that surged endlessly, curator Chitra Ramalingam and Garima Gupta searched for sanity in long, rabbit holes of conversations, heartbreaking discussions about home, belonging, landscapes of memory, movement of people but also of matter and energy and what does the future hold for institutions that are built on the back of controlling, collecting and shifting earth matter.

Built slowly from these discussions that took place across two time zones - Connecticut and New Delhi, these drawings started to develop layers of information and stories connected to each mineral. These drawings are each made up of several physical layers of drawings - each exploring lines, colours, patterns, and markings as a way of reading the geological and socio-political forces that have acted on these minerals. These layers are then stitched together with light that merges these colours, forms and patterns together in an effort to build on the mineral as more than just its physical existence.

Where you stand in the enormity of earth matter - know that this enormity is made up of several billion grains of life, of matter. Stay long enough, be, to know that each grain here moves with every passing minute - that wind, water, tectonic forces, will of man is acting on every fraction of this enormous being. What is a mountain in this tiny sliver of time and space will become sand dunes or flat lands or river beds. What really is belonging or home when you are what makes hurricanes coarse and tide pools soft and even glossy. What is having if having means a rupture in this process of matter shifting shape?