Eight Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom
Sundays, August 16 - October 11, 2026 (skips September 7th, Labor Day)
11:00 am - 1:00pm ET (NYC Time)
$180 Paid Patreon Members / $195 General Admission
PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time
What if the self is not a fixed identity, but an unfolding assemblage?
What if memory is not simply retrieval, but re-composition?
What if art is not representation, but a method for entering into relation with these invisible dynamics that shape us?
Re-membering Shakti is an eight week workshop exploring collage as a philosophical and embodied practice. Drawing from the metaphysics of the Trika branch of Kashmir Shaivism— particularly the concept of Shakti as the dynamic creative principle of existence—the course approaches image-making as a process of assembling, disassembling, and reassembling the self in relation to the world.Shakti, in this system, is the reflecting power that allows consciousness to become aware of itself. It is the cosmic pulsation which is the cause for identities to emerge and dissolve. Most importantly, Shakti is not merely power or energy acting upon consciousness but is Shiva - the absolute consciousness expressing Himself dynamically through Shakti.Rather than treating these as complete or closed systems, the course approaches them as porous and resonant vocabularies that can be layered together, borrowed from, and worked through materially. Across the workshop, ideas of vibration, emergence, multiplicity, individuation, and energetic relation become tools for artistic inquiry rather than abstract theory alone.
The course takes its title from the word re-membering: to member again, to gather fragments into provisional forms, to participate in the ongoing making and unmaking of identity. Here, Shakti is approached not simply as a goddess or symbolic figure, but as a dynamic creative principle; as the force through which forms emerge, differentiate, dissolve, and transform.
Participants will engage in storytelling exercises, diagramming practices, spatial mapping, material experimentation, and assemblage work to explore how selves are continuously composed through objects, memories, environments, gestures, and relations. Working with found materials, personal archives, photographs, textures, fragments of text, and symbolic forms, participants will gradually develop a layered personal cosmology that exists somewhere between self-portrait, shrine, diagram, and ritual object.
Throughout the workshop, we will approach collage as a way of thinking with fragments rather than a seeking to resolve them; a way of tracing invisible structures of intimacy, inheritance, contradiction, and becoming. The emphasis is not on technical mastery, but on cultivating sensitivity to process, relation, and transformation.
Across eight weeks, we will create layered personal cosmologies composed of images, textures, found objects, diagrams, stories, symbolic structures, and material residues that will culminate in the creation of a figurine-altar assemblage that operates simultaneously as self-portrait, energetic map, speculative shrine, and unstable archive of becoming.
This workshop is designed for artists, writers, seekers, ritual practitioners, educators, and anyone drawn to the intersections of mysticism, material culture, philosophy, memory work, and experimental artistic practice.
Ishita Jain is an independent artist-scholar based in Garli, Himachal Pradesh. Her work unfolds at the intersection of fictioning and form—where speculative writing, transmedia storytelling, and experimental pedagogy converge as methods of cinematic thinking. Rooted in the textures of rural Himalayan life, she explores perception, memory, and world-building through soft architectures and minor science fictions, staging landscapes as both archive and apparition.
Eight Week Class Taught Online Via Zoom
Sundays, August 16 - October 11, 2026 (skips September 7th, Labor Day)
11:00 am - 1:00pm ET (NYC Time)
$180 Paid Patreon Members / $195 General Admission
PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time
What if the self is not a fixed identity, but an unfolding assemblage?
What if memory is not simply retrieval, but re-composition?
What if art is not representation, but a method for entering into relation with these invisible dynamics that shape us?
Re-membering Shakti is an eight week workshop exploring collage as a philosophical and embodied practice. Drawing from the metaphysics of the Trika branch of Kashmir Shaivism— particularly the concept of Shakti as the dynamic creative principle of existence—the course approaches image-making as a process of assembling, disassembling, and reassembling the self in relation to the world.Shakti, in this system, is the reflecting power that allows consciousness to become aware of itself. It is the cosmic pulsation which is the cause for identities to emerge and dissolve. Most importantly, Shakti is not merely power or energy acting upon consciousness but is Shiva - the absolute consciousness expressing Himself dynamically through Shakti.Rather than treating these as complete or closed systems, the course approaches them as porous and resonant vocabularies that can be layered together, borrowed from, and worked through materially. Across the workshop, ideas of vibration, emergence, multiplicity, individuation, and energetic relation become tools for artistic inquiry rather than abstract theory alone.
The course takes its title from the word re-membering: to member again, to gather fragments into provisional forms, to participate in the ongoing making and unmaking of identity. Here, Shakti is approached not simply as a goddess or symbolic figure, but as a dynamic creative principle; as the force through which forms emerge, differentiate, dissolve, and transform.
Participants will engage in storytelling exercises, diagramming practices, spatial mapping, material experimentation, and assemblage work to explore how selves are continuously composed through objects, memories, environments, gestures, and relations. Working with found materials, personal archives, photographs, textures, fragments of text, and symbolic forms, participants will gradually develop a layered personal cosmology that exists somewhere between self-portrait, shrine, diagram, and ritual object.
Throughout the workshop, we will approach collage as a way of thinking with fragments rather than a seeking to resolve them; a way of tracing invisible structures of intimacy, inheritance, contradiction, and becoming. The emphasis is not on technical mastery, but on cultivating sensitivity to process, relation, and transformation.
Across eight weeks, we will create layered personal cosmologies composed of images, textures, found objects, diagrams, stories, symbolic structures, and material residues that will culminate in the creation of a figurine-altar assemblage that operates simultaneously as self-portrait, energetic map, speculative shrine, and unstable archive of becoming.
This workshop is designed for artists, writers, seekers, ritual practitioners, educators, and anyone drawn to the intersections of mysticism, material culture, philosophy, memory work, and experimental artistic practice.
Ishita Jain is an independent artist-scholar based in Garli, Himachal Pradesh. Her work unfolds at the intersection of fictioning and form—where speculative writing, transmedia storytelling, and experimental pedagogy converge as methods of cinematic thinking. Rooted in the textures of rural Himalayan life, she explores perception, memory, and world-building through soft architectures and minor science fictions, staging landscapes as both archive and apparition.
