I trained as an architect, and for more than a decade I built spaces for other people to live in. This work began in 2020 — confined at home during the lockdown, I started to meditate, and began to see. Images arrived in those quiet hours, vivid and insistent, returning until I understood them. With the shops shut, I built them on my iPad, the way they had appeared to me.

The face at the centre of almost every work is mine — I will not ask anyone to stand vulnerable before my work if I am not willing to be vulnerable inside it. Almost everything is rendered in a deep, held red: the colour I actually see in the visions. I still build the way an architect builds — through proportion, balance and threshold — only now the structure is meant to act on the subconscious rather than the body.

I make these images to understand myself, and share them because other people meet themselves in them too.

Every work is composed and painted by hand in Procreate and Photoshop, with no generative AI. In The Threshold Figure, each image begins as a self-portrait I photograph, then build up by hand. The Crossing is built entirely through photomanipulation and hand-work in Procreate.

Bio — Twinkle Pancholi is an architect and artist based in Ahmedabad. Trained at CEPT University and in practice for over a decade, she began her artistic work in 2020. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Kanoria Art Gallery, Ahmedabad, and in Seoul, Dubai, Singapore, Tokushima, São Paulo, the Netherlands and New York.