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DIWALI - row of lights
The Diwali festival is the celebration of good over evil, light over darkness, hope over despair. The celebration begins on the day the goddess Lakshmi was born - she was born from the churning of the cosmic ocean of milk.
In Hindu cosmology, the Ocean of Milk, Kshir Sagar, is located in the pole star - it’s another cosmological location in which people may aspire to live, far away from our current material world surrounded by a salt water ocean.
The likeliness between the Ocean of Milk and our very own galaxy, the Milky Way, is striking - not only the name is similar, even the rotating spiral galaxy structure correlates with the churning of Kshir Sagar, in which center the heavy Mount Mandala is located, much like the super massive Black hole that lies in the middle of the Milky Way.
The phrase of the churning of the cosmic ocean of milk is at the heart of this project, together with the imagery it evokes - swirly patterns, milky colours, soft drapes and wavy textures - alongside themes from Hindu cosmology such as recurring ideas of layers, infinity and unlimitedness.
Retracing the steps back to the similarities to the Milky Way, these two approaches were loosely applied onto more concrete “characters” in the shape of four of the most commonly known star constellations that are visible here - in Scotland and the Northern Hemisphere - during the time for the Diwali celebrations.
In collaboration with Scottish Love in Action, we were asked to design costumes for their fundraising event LIGHTASTIC: Firework extravaganza - a combined Diwali/Guy Fawkes Night filled with dancers and fireworks. A parcel each of donated saris and a dive headfirst into researching Diwali was our starting point of a project that came to be fabulously bright and colourful.
