Aesthetics of Everyday

The framework of the body¹ has been central to my practice for many years. During my MFA, this framework expanded beyond anatomy and movement to include the environments that shape the body in subtle, often invisible ways. In 2018, a major turning point occurred: I shifted into a completely unfurnished home with the intention of reconfiguring my everyday life from scratch. This decision emerged from a critique of my own consumption habits and from a desire to realise what I began calling the newer body¹ - a body shaped not by inherited routines, but by conscious engagement with its immediate environment. 

In my thesis, I describe how the body and the home mirror each other: both absorb, filter, and release materials; both regulate heat, air, surfaces, and flows; both host interactions that are absorbed at the level of the skin, breath, metabolism, and attention. The home, in this sense, is not separate from the body but an expanded skin, an extended sensory field. Walking barefoot on tile, sleeping on a cool floor, touching damp walls during monsoon - each of these everyday contacts reorganises bodily experience in constant, imperceptible ways. 

This insight turned the home into a site of micro-ecological study. Everyday life - usually thought of as repetitive or mundane - revealed itself to be variable, syncretic, and deeply dynamic when observed through the body: changing across seasons, temperatures, humidity, chemical residues, food patterns, and materials. My practice began to shift accordingly. I found myself cleaning for hours a day during a festival seasons, not as a ritual, but as a mode of seeing: consumption patterns, forgotten objects, and accumulated histories surfaced through the labour of cleaning. This formed the basis of what would later become Invisible/Visible. 

At the same time, small experiments emerged within this new home - experiments that linked bodily sensation, sustainability, and environmental awareness. Growing a reetha plant from seed. Replacing liquid soaps with shikakai powder in a salt shaker. Studying the systems of greywater. Reimagining open wardrobe. Observing how daily activities reorganised the micro-environments of the house. These were not large installations; they were studies in attention, early attempts at tracing the relationships between domestic life and larger ecological systems.

Taken together, these experiments formed the basis of what I call the Aesthetics of Everyday - a way of understanding the home as a porous system, where food, air, water, materials, posture, and routine all directly configure the body. 

This page gathers those early experiments - small, simple actions that helped me recognise the home as both a sensory environment and an ecological field. They were not artworks in the conventional sense, but they were decisive in shaping the trajectory of my practice. From these micro-ecologies of everyday life, my work would later expand outward into public space, community farming, and environmental planning.

¹ The terms "framework of the body" and "newer body" are defined in my MFA thesis
The Body in Omissions, Shiv Nadar University (2021)