“The beauty of nothingness is that it is not absurd at all, and absurdity is neither a state of nothingness either. In the title, Once, there was a seed, there is no reference to time, or what seed it is, or what it will grow into; neither to how long will it take, where it came from, what will happen to it. But the seed is there, and so are its stories and curiosities.”
- Sachin George Sebastian
In this important body of work titled Once, there was a seed, Sebastian brings together new drawings and cut-out sculptures cast in metal and paper. While at first glance the constructions feel fittingly thematic of his practice, in truth Sebastian’s disposition has undergone solipsistic surgery resulting in an expanded experimentation that sees him veer towards new forms and materials, including authorship and writing, as well as include insectoid life-forms sculpted in paper. His mood now having developed an existential character, Sebastian deconstructs the aesthetic logic of his previous constructions in a deeper search for the meaning of all things, incentivized as he is by personal experiences and new parenthood. “The elements once used to describe the metropolis and the beauty of chaos are now being used to describe existential questions, which has led me deeper into a space of absurdity. Of course, absurdity doesn’t make sense unless logic or sense is present. There is duality in every situation and decision, and we are always caught between these dualities of existence,” he writes.
In embracing what the artist calls the absurdity of nothingness, Sebastian replaces ideas of order with duality while considering ordinary states and spaces of daily routines. Outside of the neater categorizations that logic and definition offer, he visualizes us as caught in the intersplicing fluxes of presence, or regions of constant becoming rather than a rigid rooting in parameters of identity and circumstantial experience. In true living the center of gravity shifts further inwards, gaining a perspectival self-sufficiency that is then sought outwardly with a maniacal yet benign passion.
