For full film & sound visit Rekha’s YouTube: www.youtube.com/@RekhaGodboleArtist

This animation, relating to my grandfather's physics paper published at MIT in 1954, combines my fascination of archival scientific imagery and drawing, where graphite, ink and charcoal on paper, the repository for knowledge and memory, are the basis of this work.

How might one visualise or explain the space between not knowing and understanding? In this instance, my grandfather’s academic achievements and my lack of the physics knowledge needed to begin to comprehend them.

I attempt to illustrate the parallels between language and (mis)understanding, in this instance the Sanskrit of the Gayatri Mantra, a prayer taught to Brahmin children (particularly boys, before being sent to seminaries to learn ancient Hindu scripture), and the language and diagrams of physics. The Gayatri Mantra is a prayer of enlightenment and can be translated as calling on the light of wisdom to overcome the darkness of ignorance. Intertwined here, using smudged charcoal and a slowly animated portrait of my grandfather and distorted photographs, are notions of memory, or grasping at a remembered image of someone now lost and of what little I know of him, to mythologise family history.

The use of light projection, to create liminal spaces, replicating the imagination, or as a nexus where fantasy and reality meet, are an enduring fascination. I continue to explore and experiment with different ways of casting projections; directional, on different grounds and surfaces that break up, reflect, refract or distort the image.

Credits: Music excerpt; Ravi Shankar – Raga Kaushi Bhairav / Khamach (HMV Records)

available at: https://archive.org/details/a_20220107_20220107_2309

Other sound clips include my father's voice reciting the Gayatri Mantra and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.