Planning my Adornment - Attempt 1

Based on my secondary research I attempted at creating my adornment of Maya. While I went about this action, I saw myself imbuing meanings into objects. I was thinking of symbols, colour and visual that could recreate the traits of Maya that I had identified. I was at war with words at this phase. I was attempting to make a mask that could be genderless but could create meaning using many parts. I envisioned making this mask on a bamboo sieve. I chose a circular form for my adornment to mean the circle of time and space. I also used the circumpunct as a symbol, which is meant to mean to - ‘To know thyself, we must go within thyself’. Here is a detailed annotation of the symbolism of this adornment within the context of Maya. 

The symbolism of Adornment 1

My attempt with the adornment was wholly backed by the philosophical inquiry into the notion of Maya from secondary research, however, I found this method limiting, philosophy was constricting aesthetic engagement with the idea. I was also hugely disadvantaged with the unavailability of metaphors or ‘alamkarams’ that can be used to create a persona. This attempt feels like I am merely adorning the philosophy/idea of Maya, while ideally for the transfer of experience to happen I need to adorn traits, feelings, emotions, and visual appearance. It is only by arriving at these elements that experience can be planned. 

Another huge challenge I faced was that some of the literature that I read, denounced Maya as undesirable. Philosophical literature like, Kabir, Buddhism, and certain schools of Hindu thought speak of Maya as a distraction, that needs to be shunned. 

Kabir denouncing Maya

Even as I intend to stick to the original understanding of Maya being ‘measure’(as discussed in my previous blog post) it is important to find 'elements' that support this idea, it is important to find metaphors that I want to embrace. I will be using the next few days to reside in the compositional framework of verse, poetry, stories, etc. to gather metaphors that are used to describe Maya. It is from here that I will start to rebuild my adornment. 

Iterating on a new pathway.