Awakenings: Michelle encounters Ajanta Print

Michelle Sindha Thomas is a California-based writer and artist whose award winning work contributes to international collections. Thomas grew up in Chicago's Riverview neighborhood and graduated with honors from The University of Missouri where she studied art education. While teaching high school, she earned a Master of Liberal Arts degree at Washington University in Saint Louis, completed with explorations into art, literature, and film analysis and culminating in a publication entitled "And Others: The Pursuit of Minority Creative Expression 1984-Present". She works in a variety of media and essays themes of memory, place, and identity. Artist's Statement: My mother decided to give birth in India. When I was exactly 30 days old, we flew thousands of miles away from the tropics to a bright, cold, Chicago spring. The immigrant's nature moves him. My parents were not of immigrant nature, yet by chance, by circumstance they landed in the US. Once they landed, it is true, they became movers, shakers, corporate gypsies, but only because they were searching for a fit; they were like puppies, circling, circling, circling, trying to find a comfortable spot in the world for our family. I am not of immigrant nature, though I also keep shifting restlessly. The immigrant seeks opportunity; I look for something that feels like home, a place of heat and a place of cold, look for people who understand, search for foods that taste like an Indian-Chicagoan childhood, the glazed strawberries and marzipan tart, a neighborhood enveloped in the scent of Brach's butterscotch by night. This is why restlessness remains my constant, and why, in my paintings, I seek to delineate that place, to have what the children of immigrants never really have, a place called HOME. Though there exists a place maybe I should call home. At the extremity of a continent, on the tip of a peninsula, there, where I was born, where my parents were born, my grandparents, and their parents were born--Kerala, a small Indian enclave of coconut palms and brainy, sassy wisecrackers and humble heroes. Though I have never lived there, when we visit I feel whole; we drink the water the dinosaurs and our great-great-great-great grandparents drank. I feel most at home in airports. The world is a big house, and the countries are rooms, and we can always go back. And forth.