A kolam is drawn at dawn, in rice flour, on the ground outside a door. It is a decoration, and it is also a small act of feeding — ants and birds take the flour during the day, which is the point, and by evening the drawing is gone. It is made to be erased.
Janani grew up with them. What she did not have was a record of them, until she found her grandmother’s notebook: pages of patterns in pen, drawn by someone who was not thinking about art at all, only about remembering a sequence of dots.
She went back to pen because of that notebook. Not to copy the patterns — to work the way the notebook worked, where the line is a note to yourself rather than a performance.
One opportunity this week. [Open call, checked before it goes out.]