Abhaya

The project began as an attempt to give form to the contradictions inside every human bond, two wishes that never settle: to stay, and not to disappear into the other.

In the first panel two young women of ancient Rome meet in a kiss, above them the words: don’t turn away from love. This is connection in its dreamlike form, what ties us to another, pure desire before it turns into demand.

At the centre, the dharmachakra: the wheel of dharma, eight spokes, one for each step of the eightfold path. Buddhist tradition describes it as the way to liberation — yet here it never completes a turn, but swings back and forth, like a ship’s rudder correcting its course again and again.

In the third panel a figure in a deer mask turns on itself and behind it we read: I’ll never be yours to control. This is the refusal of possession. The deer is Artemis’s animal, and the shape given to anyone who tries to hold her with a look. It is also the animal that sat listening at Sarnath, on either side of the wheel.

Abhaya, in Sanskrit, means without fear. Not something reached, but the condition of someone with nothing left to guard, like the two women’s hands, open, holding nothing.