In the quiet, circular space of Floating in the Well, I return to a memory from my childhood in Assam: of floating in a well, coconuts drifting beside me, the water cool against my skin, sunlight dancing above. It was a moment of stillness and safety, suspended between the surface and the unknown below. Over time, this memory, once vivid, began to blur beneath another, darker one rooted in the same landscape. The well, once a sanctuary, became a site of forgetting.

This drawing installation, charcoal on canvas wrapped around a three-meter diameter cylindrical form, is an act of remembering and reclaiming. It is not an attempt to erase the shadow, but to sit with it, to honour what was once beautiful, and to gently make space for its return. Charcoal, with its rawness and residue, becomes both a mark and a memory. Each stroke is a reckoning with what lingers beneath the surface.

This work is grounded in an ecopoetic impulse to speak with and through the land rather than only about it. The well becomes more than a personal site; it is a vessel of layered ecologies, carrying the sediment of memory, place, and time. Through drawing and listening, I engage in an ecopoetic process, one that cultivates meaning in the spaces between body and environment, inner world and external terrain.

Sound accompanies drawing. The soft breath of the Sulur wind flute, an instrument from central India, guides this return. It became my anchor through the process: its voice soft, persistent, rooted in the earth, offering courage where language fell short. This flute, once played by others, now threads through my own body as I begin to develop a movement practice shaped by its rhythms and silences.

Floating in the Well is a threshold space, between past and present, grief and grace, forgetting and becoming. It is a beginning again.

Acknowledgements: With profound gratitude to Emily Bottomer for her help in stretching all 12 canvases and to Dhruv Prakash for the photographs. This work is a result of the collective spirit and support provided by the wood workshop at Central Saint Martins. And special thanks to my academic mentor, Esi Eshun.

Created in memory of Sanjju Uncle (Sanjay Jain), who passed away in a bomb blast at my family home/shop beside a well.