u/Dr_raj_l

The Place From My Dreams
Terracotta, clay, stone, living succulents — 2026

Something came down here.
The vessel lies split at the center of the plain, half-buried in red gravel. Its hull is mirror-bright, and on that polished surface a blue-green world; a planet in orbit, perhaps. Or a distant memory held by the ship itself.

Look long enough and the question turns over: is the world above us, or was it always behind us?
The terrain is red. Iron-red, dust-red, the red of a place that has forgotten water. The ground is not soil but fragments; broken vessels, shattered rims, the curved shards of things that once held something. Every surface here is the remains of something else.
And yet it is inhabited, or is it?

On the high ground stands the StarGate; a serpent coiled into a perfect ring, its body inscribed with markings no one alive can read. Through the opening: another place. Not empty. You can see stone on the far side.
Below it, the green one waits. One of the keepers, patient, positioned exactly where the path meets the rise. Not blocking. Watching. It has been at this post a long time.
A face lies half-buried in the gravel, eyes closed, a mark between the brows. Beside it, four pale stones that are not stones at all — they are alive, patterned like split skulls, breathing on a timescale we cannot perceive.
A white dome rises from the dust. Windows cut in rows. A crescent opening near the top. Someone built this. Someone lived here. Something may be living here still.
Nothing in this world is whole.
Every element is a fragment set into new relationship with other fragments. And out of that breaking — a landscape. A settlement. A gate that still functions. Life pushing green through red gravel.
This is what happens after.
Not the moment of destruction. The long quiet that follows, when the dust has settled and something has begun again in the ruins. When the vessel that carried you here will never fly again, and the world you came from exists only as light on its surface, and you must build with what shattered.
If you find yourself looking for the way out, look at the Gate.
It is still open.
It was always still open.

The Place From My Dreams
Terracotta, clay, stone, living succulents — 2026

Something came down here.
The vessel lies split at the center of the plain, half-buried in red gravel. Its hull is mirror-bright, and on that polished surface a blue-green world; a planet in orbit, perhaps. Or a distant memory held by the ship itself.

Look long enough and the question turns over: is the world above us, or was it always behind us?
The terrain is red. Iron-red, dust-red, the red of a place that has forgotten water. The ground is not soil but fragments; broken vessels, shattered rims, the curved shards of things that once held something. Every surface here is the remains of something else.
And yet it is inhabited, or is it?

On the high ground stands the StarGate; a serpent coiled into a perfect ring, its body inscribed with markings no one alive can read. Through the opening: another place. Not empty. You can see stone on the far side.
Below it, the green one waits. One of the keepers, patient, positioned exactly where the path meets the rise. Not blocking. Watching. It has been at this post a long time.
A face lies half-buried in the gravel, eyes closed, a mark between the brows. Beside it, four pale stones that are not stones at all — they are alive, patterned like split skulls, breathing on a timescale we cannot perceive.
A white dome rises from the dust. Windows cut in rows. A crescent opening near the top. Someone built this. Someone lived here. Something may be living here still.
Nothing in this world is whole.
Every element is a fragment set into new relationship with other fragments. And out of that breaking — a landscape. A settlement. A gate that still functions. Life pushing green through red gravel.
This is what happens after.
Not the moment of destruction. The long quiet that follows, when the dust has settled and something has begun again in the ruins. When the vessel that carried you here will never fly again, and the world you came from exists only as light on its surface, and you must build with what shattered.
If you find yourself looking for the way out, look at the Gate.
It is still open.
It was always still open.

The Skin of Many Lives

At first glance, the piece feels crowded,  bodies pressed against bodies, faces emerging from shadow, eyes watching from impossible angles. But the longer you remain with it, the more the image begins to rotate inside you. Nothing here is singular. Every form carries another life beneath it.

Near the center, a sheep-faced being hangs in stillness, wrapped into the garment of another figure. Its expression holds the quiet ache of trust offered too freely;  the moment innocence realizes the exchange required more than expected. Above it, an apple is extended by a water-being whose presence feels ancient and tidal, neither cruel nor kind, but inevitable. The apple is alive. Its leaves become lips, whispering invitation, seduction, prophecy.

Elsewhere, tribal markings streak across the face of a watchful figure draped in animal hide, as though memory itself has been worn into the skin. Along the edges, pale beings dissolve into one another; some human, some aquatic, some serpent-like, some impossible to name. Hair becomes river. Scales become fabric. Faces emerge from negative space and disappear again when the image turns.

Throughout the work, eyes remain open. Yellow eyes. Red eyes. Blue eyes. Not decorative, but aware.  Distributed like fragments of consciousness witnessing the same event from different dimensions.

At the base of the composition, serpent and fish forms curl beneath the assembly like an ancient current moving below language itself. They anchor the piece in something primordial, older than story, older than certainty.

This is not a portrait of separate beings. It is a map of transformation through encounter, of  what is offered, what is surrendered, and  what is carried afterward. A field of identities folding into one another across many lifetimes.

The Skin of Many Lives does not ask to be understood all at once.

It asks to be turned.

And remembered.