The Dot, 2022

“The Dot” is a series of 13 paintings and collages that developed around a conversation about culture and evolved to a place of scientific theory.

The painting series started from a discussion about the bindi. The word bindi comes from the Sanskrit word Bindu which roughly translates as dot. A bindi is a dot applied to the center of the forehead worn most often by Hindus in the Indian subcontinent. There are multiple cultural and religious meanings, interpretations, and understandings about what the bindi signifies. However, one interpretation that drove the series of paintings forward is “the bindi acts as a dot around which the mandala is created, representing the universe.”

The journey of connecting the dot to the universe led the project beyond the Indian subcontinent to Georges Lemaître’s scientific theory of the Big Bang. Georges Lemaître first noted in 1927 that an expanding universe could be traced back in time to a single originating point, which he called the “primeval atom,” which disintegrated in an explosion, giving rise to space and time and the expansion of the universe that continues to this day.

The Dot series becomes a play between trying to visualize an abstract philosophical concept and visualizing an abstract scientific theory. Both ideas are conceptual and challenging to grasp in a visually concrete method.

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