As in a Buddhst chant, Ramakrishnan relies on words and repetition to sculpt space. The written, embedded text charges the space of a painting in a certain direction, giving it energy, velocity, rhythm, rather than a specific narrative. Each phrase is a circle, progressing into other circles. To become one with our environment, to survive under ever-changing conditions, we must suspend judgment, clear our mind and surrender to the sound of the chant. The embedded text sets physical parameters for the outer layers. 

In the ocean of time we can touch the past, because it is no longer behind us but spirals up to us from the deep, curls back on itself from within a terrifying empty blue. We carry the memories that have shaped us and keep them alive by continuing to be. They calcify and they are eroded by the processes of life. They become shell-like. The ocean has once risen and taken nearly away everything from us, as suggested in both the mythological and archaeological records (i.e. memories contained in collective dreaming and memories contained in matter). It has swallowed our pasts, given us amnesia. And yet it is in the ocean through which we remember our connection to living beings – and our connection to the cosmos to which our beloved, watery rock belongs. After all, water, the seed of life, traveled here from unknown places. 

When the sun grows larger and turns red, consuming the planets, when the seas rise and swallow land, sea flowers and anemones become the landscape, how shall we adapt, what creatures shall we emulate? Will we see that waves – ocean waves and sound waves – are the universal connective tissue, timeless, weightless, all-encompassing, omnipresent, and always changing? ​