Three Celestial Bodies

There is a script on this painting that no single language can fully decode — and that is precisely the point. Nandi Makala grew up holding three cultures simultaneously: French, Congolese, Ivorian. She learned early that meaning does not always travel through words, that some knowledge lives in pattern, in symbol, in the way a mark is made rather than what it literally depicts. The golden glyphs that populate the deep blue field of this work are that knowledge made visible — a personal cosmology drawn from the multiple symbolic traditions she carries in her body. At the center of it all, three gold orbs hang in alignment — sun, moon, star, ancestor, self, descendant: the viewer may choose. What cannot be chosen is the feeling they produce. Makala embroidered each disc by hand, stitching radiating lines outward from a central point in the manner of light itself expanding from a source. These stitches are not decorative. They are the record of a sustained, focused act of making — hours of hands moving thread through painted canvas, the same meditative discipline she learned at Hermès translated now into something entirely her own. This is a painting about Origins — the first of Makala's three anchoring themes — and it reaches toward the cosmic with the warmth of the personal. The blue that surrounds the gold is not cold. It is the blue of deep sky at the moment before dawn, when the stars are still visible and the light has already begun. Something is arriving. Something has always been there.