Hand engraving on brass
35.5 x 20 cm each 
4 works from an ongoing series

This body of work examines how language moves from speech to habit. It transforms everyday Tamil phrases, often used to control, silence, or diminish, into coded Bharati Braille, removing direct readability and translating speech into tactile form. These dot structures are then expanded into kolam patterns, a domestic ritual traditionally drawn at the threshold of the home.

By passing speech through code and then into ornamental repetition, the work mirrors how repeated harmful language becomes internalised, normalised, and inherited across generations. What begins as spoken instruction settles into the body and reappears as pattern, ritual and habit.

Phrases like “உனக்கு எதுவும் தெரியாது” (unnakku edhuvum theriyaadhu / you don’t know anything) or “சும்மா இரு” (summa iru / be quiet) are not loud forms of violence; they are soft, persistent, and absorbed over time.

Brass is used to record these patterns as objects of endurance, inheritance and memory, exposing the quiet ways culture shapes behaviour, belonging and the body itself.

This work is not about the phrases themselves, but about their afterlives.
How they settle.
How they become pattern.
How we continue to step over them.