Dark and unseen, black holes strange inexorable power make space flow faster than light, devour anything straying too close, and even stop time.
Stranger still, these terrifying manifestations are also personified in a Buddhist and Hindu deity, the wrathful Mahākāla, known as the Great BlackOne and God of Time.
Black holes and Mahākāla are terrifying oddities, presenting profound intellectual challenges to scholars of their time.
It is from these bizarre intersections in physics and religion that the inspiration for this carved woodblock emerged.
Using astrophysics as a guide, and leaning on the visual language of Tibetan thangka, I composed the artwork using the structure of a black hole.
The painting’s outer rim depicts the violence of distorting space of an accretion disc, followed by the boundary of the event horizon. In the centre I placed a mystic figure in the centre with the tools we deploy to explore the universe.
An antenna-like sceptre, symbolising communication. A brush symbolises literacy and collective knowledge. An abacus symbolises numeracy and computing. A mirror enables us to observe further into space and time, revealing the deeper structure of reality.
At the centre lies the mysterious heart of a black hole, known in astrophysics as the “singularity”, guarded jealously by the wielder wearing a crown of five skulls, representing the transmutation of the five sins into the five wisdoms.
By embracing both science and religion, this painting illustrates a serendipitous intersection and explores the story of humanity's insatiable intellectual desire to understand in the world around us.
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