Illustration • Research • Visual Worldbuilding
A self-initiated ongoing series exploring the ten avatars of Vishnu — departing from established iconographic convention to ask what divinity might feel like from the inside of it, rendered not as symbol but as physical, consequential experience.
Indian mythological illustration has a long tradition — and a persistent problem. The gods are depicted as they have always been depicted: iconic, fixed, unreachable. Beautiful, but at a distance. The Dasavataram series began with a refusal of that distance: not a rejection of tradition, but a question addressed to it. What does Matsya feel like, moving through the dark water with the weight of sacred knowledge? What does it cost Kurma to hold a mountain? What is it like to be Vamana, and to know what you are about to become?
The series works in monochrome — ink and digital — because colour, here, would be too easy. Colour resolves. It places. Monochrome keeps the images in a state of productive uncertainty: ancient and contemporary, mythological and visceral, simultaneously. The visual language draws on the tradition of ukiyo-e woodblock printing — the flattened picture plane, the concentrated linework, the treatment of water and atmosphere as active rather than background — recontextualised within an Indian mythological framework. The influence is acknowledged and then exceeded.
The avatars are compelling not because they transcend embodiment — but because they are fully, consequentially inside it.
Each avatar presents a distinct formal problem. Matsya: luminosity in depth. Kurma: weight without drama. Vamana: the vertigo of sudden expansion. Varaha: labour without witness. The series is not yet complete. It will not be complete until all ten have been answered.
The Dasavataram is a story about a consciousness that moves through forms — fish, tortoise, boar, dwarf, man — each one suited to a particular crisis. This series is an attempt to feel what those forms felt like from the inside, and to make that feeling visible.
Project: Dasavataram • Studio: Studio Apara • Scope: Self-Initiated Series · Ongoing
