Most of the raw material for the mural segments used in this series were photographed in Kumartuli, an area in Calcutta (Kolkata), India where artisans create and build mud and straw statues for Hindu festivals.

While I am lining up the imagery, my two helpers are always around me; one in the striped shirt is clicking the shutter and the other, holding the umbrella is verbally counting off the 36 exposure rolls so I know where I am during the photographing.

These murals are an Epitaph for humanity, a sentient planetary species which has now passed through it's preservation phase and is entering into the beginning phases of the destructive ending to it's existence. All of cosmic life has been created through a process of primary evolutionary impetus. Natural cosmic evolution functions upon the principles of original creation, sustainable preservation, and finally destruction inherent in any renewal process.

This planet acting like the mother it is, preserves the life that it alone gave birth too. For a period of time, however as the cycle of life progresses through its natural phases, it can easily be bullied and pushed by organic arrogance, profound ignorance and cosmic illiteracy, until eventually quite suddenly, in self defense, the system enters into a destructive end phase, thus destroying the life that it alone has created. This forced destruction is manifested by hostile highly unstable cosmic or planetary circumstances. It is just the planet's defense mechanism kicking in and in fact the evolutionary way of preparing the ground for endless fresh ongoing creation.

These Epitaph mural images as you see them on these pages never actually existed. While they have been birthed using the shapes photographed from long dissolved Yogini mud and straw statues, the murals are actually nothing more than visual ghosts within the cosmos. Those fleeting signs of our materially aware but completely out of harmony highly destructive passage on this planet. They live only through the act of inspired sentient image recreation.

The Yogini statues themselves existed for just a very short period of time, crafted from Indian Hooghly River mud straw and bamboo to appear in an Indian Hindu Puja dedicated to a belief in the concept of endless ongoing creation, preservation, and destruction. Within ten days of their creation, and after taking part in a festival honoring the Hindu Goddess Kali, they were immersed and returned back to the river's timeless flow to once again in symbolic validity become river mud, floating straw and bobbing bamboo.

The visual ghosts seen in these murals are those mirroring echoes of human sentience, a sign of a cosmic life force that was infused with evolutionary inspired awareness, encouraging it to try and become worthy of its very creation. Human beings on this planet seem to believe that we are permanently alive here in this cosmic dream of life, but just as it was for the Yogini mud and straw statues our time here on this planet will also cease to exist.

The choice however is ours, to affect our time here by inducing it into becoming quite short and most untimely, like the story of the mud and straw statues. Or have it be knowledgeably sustainable for the long term, there by allowing organic sentience in the form of humanity to grow and progress into full maturity, eventually becoming worthy of it's creation by becoming a cosmically and planetary enlightened species.