Space, the final canvas

The physics graduate’s background in science and her obsession with art came together over six years ago, and she was the first person to paint a series of artworks while in zero gravity! Ankita, who considers her project Zero Gravity, nothing holds us down a turning point in her life, feels she has found more than what she was looking for in life in the emptiness of space.

“It all began when, in my personal life, I was at a stage where I had nothing to bank upon. I had just completed my education and had no burdens or commitments. I took up a lot of meditation, and slowly I experienced a mental state of weightlessness and found it a profound experience. That is when I came up with the idea of ‘nullism’, the state of nothingness, which is what my project is based upon,” says Ankita, speaking about the idea behind her work.

The artist who actually took a parabolic flight from Tampa Bay in Florida to experience weightlessness says, “The feeling that nothing is holding you down actually began more on the mental realm. And as they say, the physical and the metaphysical are inter-related. Hence, I wanted to try if that metaphysical state of weightlessness can be emulated by putting yourself in a physical state of weightlessness.”

About the experience of zero gravity, Ankita says, “It was a sense of achievement. Not in the way you feel when you win a race, but more akin to a sense of fulfillment in life. The advisable amount of parabolic trips one can take is around 11, however, in my flight I took about 72 such trips. It put me in a bad state physically, but I found what I was looking for.”

And it was this very escape from gravity that brought to life Ankita’s project. While art has delved into various philosophies and profound ideas that are aimed at transcending the tangible, Ankita’s work is indeed based on an extremely tangible concept of gravity. “If the Sun’s gravity is stronger than the Earth’s, why is the moon rotating around the Earth, and not the Sun? There are a gazillion other questions like this that led me to consider the concept of gravity and the lack of it as the subject of my work,” adds the curious painter.

With gravity defeated, Ankita has now turned her attention towards conquering the last frontier for her next series of paintings. Titled Beyond Infinity, the project, says Ankita will include a trip to space. “In Zero Gravity, I experienced the world without gravity, however, with my next project I want to take a leap further and go out of the world to space, which signifies infinity and serves as the inspiration for the project.” However, with space literally being an out of the world experience, Ankita has had to depend on whether and when Richard Branson’s project Virgin Galactic takes off to pursue her project.

While many artistes take a world tour and others shut themselves in a room for days on end to look for inspiration, Ankita just went a step ahead and took a leap into space to find her calling.