Constructed by layering, the blue haze of the paper cut-out behind the drawing represents the "Big Hole" in Kimberley - a 215-meter deep pit, hand dug by around fifty thousand mine workers to excavate diamonds. After the mine's closure in 1914, the Big Hole got flooded and became a marketed tourism site. This blue shape encompasses the drawing on the front - three Kimberlite rocks in which diamonds are found.

Kimberley mines were the place where modern day diamond mining was consolidated and industrialized, and eventually fully monopolized by De Beers by the late 1880s.

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?