Annotations: As we work right to left for each trio, the right most page is a piece of found paper onto which Katki inscribed brief summaries from his more extensive journal of notes regarding the Tablet IV dreams. Dream 1 – 5 signify each dream from Gilgamesh; while the taped blue square sheet of found stationary from his grandmother’s drawer contain notes that were immediately scribed (in various pencil colors on paper) when Katki woke up from his dreams and recalled some of the more concrete incidents and images from his subconscious mind. Thus, a layering began to unfold and reveal the veil between the atavistic, ancestral memory from Gilgamesh—and how it began to bleed into Katki’s own experiences with psychological distress. Here, the act of communing with a queer antecedent becomes an amorphous exercise where language, emotion and affect begin to bleed across time.

Paintings: The two paintings on cotton paper beside the annotations are early studies in watercolor, graphite, chalk and oil pastel on cotton paper, which intimated the composition of the works as they would all later be executed in hand-embroidery over large panels of khadi towels. The weft and warp border stripes, along with the specific base color grounds of each painting (made as diptychs to be read from left to right) also suggest how these early pictorial and narrative decisions were made by Katki as he formulated all five final compositions.