Through sculpture, painting, printmaking, and photography, I begin with observation and explore memory, place, and perception, guided by reflection and imagination.
I am working on a manuscript, tentatively entitled, Held in Tension: Between Structure and Intuition, Here are the mock ups of the front and back covers as well as brief description of the book and some front matter
Held in Tension: Between Structure and Intuition brings together sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, and poetry created over more than three decades. Organized around six thematic sections—Held in Tension, Fracture of Meaning, Afterimages, Embodied Rhythms, Echoes of Place, and Poems into Image—the book reflects a practice rooted in careful observation, sustained reflection, and imagination. Across its pages, recurring themes of structure, memory, movement, place, and perception emerge through different media, inviting readers to discover connections that unfold gradually rather than offering fixed interpretations.
Running throughout the book is a dialogue between engineering and art, structure and intuition, abstraction and representation. Ori-hagane (“folded steel”), a sculptural system developed from interlocking stainless-steel elements assembled without welding, appears alongside paintings, photographs, printmaking, and poetry. Together, these works reflect a life shaped by India, Berkeley, and Seattle, and by enduring interests in literature, travel, architecture, and lived cultural experience.
Here are some of the essays/statements from the book
Introduction
This book brings together works created over many years in sculpture, painting, photography, and printmaking. Though varied in medium, they are connected by recurring questions about balance, perception, memory, language, movement, and place.
Organized around themes rather than chronology, the pages that follow invite exploration rather than a linear reading. I hope you will move through them as you might a landscape—pausing where something resonates, returning to what remains unresolved, and allowing unexpected connections to emerge along the way.
Learning to See
As a child, I drew in secret.
I grew up in a lower-middle-class family in South India where education was valued. Art, with the exception of music, was not given much importance. No one discouraged me from drawing, but it was never considered something one would build a life around. So I drew quietly, mostly for myself. Looking back, I realize those drawings were the way I began making sense of the world.
India also taught me the value of tradition. I came to see it not as a constraint, but as a secure foundation for exploration. It offered continuity and a sense of place while leaving room to question, discover, and eventually find my own voice.
Science and engineering became my profession and introduced another way of understanding the world. They taught me to question assumptions, distinguish evidence from opinion, and value careful observation over quick conclusions. I learned that understanding begins not with certainty, but with paying attention. Those habits have remained with me.
Drawing and painting never disappeared. Even during the busiest years of teaching, research, writing, and international travel, I returned to them whenever I could. The intervals between works became long, but the impulse itself never left me.
On a visit to Zimbabwe in the 1990s, I put my camera away and carried a sketchbook and a small watercolor set instead. I drew landscapes, wildlife, safari camps, and the people I encountered along the way. I had to remain in one place long enough to understand its forms, rhythms, and character before putting pencil or brush to paper. I returned home with fewer images than a camera would have given me, but with a deeper understanding of what I had seen. That experience taught me the difference between looking and seeing.
The same decade, I attended atelier classes with Joan Finton whenever my schedule allowed. Later, while in Glasgow to deliver engineering lectures, I spent a weekend learning screen printing. Before I left, the instructor handed me a key to the studio and invited me to return whenever I wished to make more prints.
Travel revealed another lesson. Every culture expresses itself differently through its traditions, architecture, music, literature, and art. Yet beneath those differences I found the same human aspirations: beauty, meaning, belonging, and connection. What changed from place to place was not the aspiration itself, but the language through which it was expressed.
During the COVID pandemic, my constant business travel came to an abrupt halt. For the first time in decades, I had uninterrupted time to return to my art practice. It was then that I decided that, when I retired, I would turn the page on my academic career and devote myself fully to an artistic practice. Retirement did not create an artist; it simply allowed a lifelong journey to fully express itself.
Not long ago, while sorting through old papers, I came across one of the drawings I had made more than fifty-five years earlier. That drawing eventually became the basis for my intaglio print, Reaching. It reminded me that some ideas remain quietly with us for a lifetime, waiting until we are ready to understand them.
Looking back, I realize that, whether in science, travel, or art, I have always been trying to understand the world more deeply. Perhaps that is what this lifelong journey has really been about—learning to see.
Between Structure and Intuition
Every work begins with a conversation among structure, intuition, reflection, and imagination.
My years in science and engineering taught me to appreciate the logic of structures, the behavior of materials, and the relationships that allow complex systems to function. Art led me toward different questions—about perception, memory, ambiguity, and metaphor. What at first appeared to be separate pursuits gradually revealed themselves to be complementary ways of understanding and exploring the world.
Engineering taught me precision, discipline, and respect for the integrity of materials. Art taught me that discovery often begins where certainty ends. Structure provides a framework, intuition allows unexpected relationships to emerge, and imagination explores possibilities beyond both. The work develops through an ongoing conversation among them.
That dialogue found its clearest expression in the development of Ori-hagane—Japanese for "folded steel." It began with a simple question: could complex structures emerge through relationships rather than permanence? The resulting sculptures are assembled from interlocking elements whose balance depends upon compression, tension, gravity, and negative space. Stability emerges not through permanent fusion, but through the dynamic interaction of the parts.
Although Ori-hagane is unique to my sculptural practice, the underlying way of thinking extends across everything I make. Whether I am working with sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, collage, or writing, I am interested less in isolated objects than in the relationships that give them meaning. Across these different forms, I find myself returning to the same questions: the interplay of form and void, memory and observation, order and improvisation.
For me, making art is neither an engineering exercise nor an act of unfettered expression. It is an exploration of the fertile ground where structure, intuition, and imagination meet. It is there that ideas gradually acquire form, materials begin to carry meaning, and the work becomes something I could not have anticipated when I first began.
On the work
Observation remains the starting point of my work. The longer I look, the more I discover that the world is richer, more ambiguous, and more interconnected than it first appears. The places I have lived and the cultures I have encountered continue to shape the way I see the world. Reflection allows ideas to mature until intuition and imagination transform them into visual form, often through metaphor, ambiguity, and an occasional touch of humor. I observe through my senses, think through my mind, and comprehend through my imagination; the medium simply becomes the one that best serves that process. Whether working in sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, or collage, I hope my work invites others to slow down, look carefully, and discover something they had not seen before.
One expression of this way of working is Ori-hagane ("folded steel," in Japanese), a sculptural system I developed to construct three-dimensional forms from flat stainless-steel sheets without welding. Through interlocking elements and the active use of negative space, these works explore how relationships give rise to balance, tension, interdependence, and transformation.