Pans & Spaces

In 2019-2020 I was working at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, as a graduate intern in the museum’s design department. Selected through a grant application meant for professionals immediately after their postgraduates studies, this one-year internship was an ideal next step for me, upon completion of my MA in cultural studies at SOAS, London. But it came with a restriction—the visa was strictly for the time duration of the internship without the possibility of an extension.  

That one year was one of the most intellectually nourishing years I’ve had. I was part of a cohort of nearly 30 other interns, who came in form various parts of the planet, to work in different departments at the J Paul Getty Trust with roles in conservation, curation, material research and public engagement. My own department, of Design, had (and still has) some of the most professionally brilliant as well as empathetic people I have had the privilege to work with, and simply be around.

And then there is Rustic Canyon, in the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in LA, where I lived. Since I didn’t own a car, I decided to find a place for one year that would be on a prominent bus route. Thankfully the Getty Museum is a major bus stop in itself and I found myself a little room to rent in a retired lady’s home in the Palisades, right on Sunset boulevard. As you can imagine, the years 2019-2020 were quite eventful. First there was a ‘wildfire’ near the Getty museum in October 2019. It was a big enough fire to send everybody in the area packing at 2am to evaluate to a safer zone. Next, the pandemic lockdowns took effect in March 2020, making us all shift to working from home. It was during the early lockdown days that I ran out of my most used inks, without the possibility of buying new ones at a store or online, that I found myself stewing down scraps from kitchen and garden waste, to see if I could make my own colours. 

The Context: California Scrub-Jay in the Palisades.
This work is my interpretation of how very disorienting this climate as well as human induced fire incident in the Palisades has been this year, 2025.

Pacific Palisades was where I began my experiments in botanical colours. Not just by sitting at home and stewing kitchen scraps, but by walking all around the neighborhood looking for fallen leaves and flowers that I could use to make colours. It was also the neighborhood where I did some mundane but essential things like grocery runs, bank visits, doctors’ appointments—at businesses owned, managed or staffed by people of colour, who made my experience of living in a white majority neighbourhood a little less daunting. It was quite the year—in making new social connections, learning new skills, and repurposing old ones to tackle unprecedented circumstances!

Now if I, having spent just one year in that area of the planet, feel this inexplicable sense of loss in the wake of the fires, I can’t imagine what it must be like to see one’s lifelong home, business, place of work be completely razed, or have just about survive it. And then what about alllll those living beings that are not humans, that we don’t think about for our survival, but without them living on this planet would be near impossible? What kind of effort will it take to rebuild, here and in other parts of the world that have been torn apart and burnt?