Portrait: DM #1 - Limited Edition 3 of 5 Artwork

Throughout my sporting life, all people asked - What’s it like to be a woman, what’s it like to be Indian? Meaningless questions when all I cared for was what it felt to play football. In my work, I strip gender, age, race from my subjects. I capture what remains when one dances, plays, moves, just is. And from this I create my art. And no-one ever asks if the dancer, the fighter, whomever in my print, is a woman, or Indian, or anything really. Because that was never the point. Permi Jhooti Motive Emotive motive – A reason for doing something. emotive – arousing or able to arouse intense feeling. Motive Emotive, these two words sum up my life. But I was never asked about this when discussing my football or my work. Somehow, being Indian or a woman, an outsider or a minority was deemed more important a discussion point. And yet, this missed the point of my being completely, no matter how much influence being these things may have had on my life. I started my journey away from a Science career which had given me conventional success because it lacked the feelings I had gotten from my sport, that pure 100% feeling of being so engaged in something that nothing else exists. I had never believed I had it in me to be an artist because, for all the canvases and paints I invested in, I was unable to make that first stroke onto the canvas. A lifetime of being aware of what was right or wrong, a product of my background, culture and personality, how could I ever start? No wonder I felt more comfortable in the world of data and numbers as a computer scientist. And then I discovered the kinect camera, a camera made for me. I do not take videos from it, I simply record data of the positions of everything it sees. The camera did everything I had ever dreamed, it cared only for the motion of a person, the sex, colour or age of the person was irrelevant. Data, a world I am comfortable with. Everyone is reduced to numbers, something we all say we never want to be. And yet, not one person has looked at the most basic visualisation of themselves as simple white pixels and said anything other than, “wow, that looks beautiful”. “You are beautiful” I agree. Noone looks at a visualisation of themselves jumping and turning through the air and groans that their hair looks funny, their facial expression is all wrong, missing the whole beauty in what they are doing.