360 Test Tubes from Ubi Road
360 Test Tubes From Ubi Road
1997, Wetterling Teo Gallery
This installation converts Wetterling Teo’s main hall into a kinetic meditation on time, matter, and memory. Suspended at the gallery’s core is a helix of 360 glass test tubes, each alternately filled with red, black, and white pigment, corked, and hung by nylon line. Arranged in a tightening spiral—wider at the top, tapering toward the floor—this constellation evokes a celestial clock whose “seconds” are droplets of colour rather than ticks. A mirror above and a circular water tray below double the form, so viewers witness the spiral endlessly rising and falling, hinting at time’s dual nature: linear in our experience yet infinite in reflection.
Along the walls, crimson canvases glow like embers. Some cradle miniature bronze vessels and temple bells at their edges, quietly inviting the senses of sound and tactility into what at first appears to be pure painting. Elsewhere, shaped canvases march in near‑mural continuity, their collective red aura bleeding into the room and visually “touching” the pigments sealed inside the tubes. The result is a chromatic field that seems to breathe, its heat balanced by the cool water directly beneath the spiral.
Symbolically, the work expands the circle of Kumari’s earlier “360 Vessels” from cyclical time to linear progression: the full 360° of a circle is “unwound” into a screw‑like trajectory that still honours the sacred number but propels it forward. The pigments mark phases—birth (red), dissolution (black), and the liminal space between (white)—while the test‑tube helix references DNA, linking cosmic cycles to the intimate code of life. The installation’s inauguration date, foregrounded in the title, behaves like the first page of an almanac: a fixed point from which to chart seasons, rituals, and destinies.
Visitors remove their shoes, step onto the wood floor, and feel the air’s charged stillness. Light splinters through the tubes, ripples across water, and rebounds from the overhead mirror, weaving an optical lattice that suggests time is not only counted but experienced—refracted through memory, culture, and the body. By fusing scientific glassware with devotional objects, Kumari allies empirical observation with spiritual intuition, proposing that measurement and mystery are two facets of the same inexhaustible continuum.