Beautiful Power™
Collection
Make Beautiful Power visible in the everyday.
Beautiful power · collection / 01
The Bindi/
From I to US
A Visual System of Care
2024 · hand-pulled 4-color photo-litho on paper
limited edition of 30 · 11 × 17 in · signed and numbered
The Bindi/From I to Us is an expression of the EMBRACE visual system. Rooted in the bindi that adorns a woman’s forehead as a point of attention, this hand-pulled print symbolically captures a story of care, visibility, and imperfect human touch.
We have symbols for peace, for recycling, for fair trade, for accessibility. We have none for care.
What has no symbol has no standard. With The Bindi/From I to Us, we begin to change that.
Frame included · Plus shipping
Also available in sets of two or three.
ARTIST STATEMENT
This print began with my mother. Every morning of my childhood, she placed a red bindi on her forehead. That singular gesture shifted my attention from what she wore to who she was. Rather than decoration, that bindi was focus, presence, and quiet power.
A single mark can change where we look.
That bindi is the seed of my visual system of care. The master symbol encodes EIQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient) in nested form. The system draws from ancient and indigenous narratives across Adinkra symbolism, Ardhanarishvara form, Chinese coins, and Madhubani Katchni painting.
This visual system originates from my MFA thesis EMBRACE: The Journey to Empathy and Compassion. It has been exhibited at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Colorado State University and has been published on ProQuest.
No two pulls are identical. After a series of hand-drawn explorations, The Bindi/From I to Us was drawn digitally, exposed through precise registration on metal plates, custom-inked by hand, pulled through the press onto 300 GSM paper, and dried over days between layers. Small shifts in ink, texture, and registration are not flaws. They are evidence of imperfect human touch.
To make care visible is power. To make it together is Beautiful Power.
About the Bindi Project
It began as Sumanma's thesis. At its center is the EIQ spiral. Around it, a vocabulary of forms, each one named and standing for what care is made of.
Care is universal. But it does not have a language of its own.
Sunaina and Sumanma are building that language into a textiles project, rendering it across living craft traditions—embroidery, weaving, thread and block—by the indigenous and regional artisans who keep them. Craft is the translation. Each tradition speaks it in its own hand.
Each piece names its craft, its region, its makers. To make their work visible is care in and of itself. A language of care, read in many hands.
The pieces shown here are early studies.
