What first captivated me in Sahana Ramakrishnan's paintings was her representation of animals. Some of her works depict animals with humans, while others replace humans with animals. Many more show animals and humans in speculative, hybrid, and fragmentary forms. There is no hierarchy amongst these personae, all of whom embody consciousness and agency. Ramakrishnan's body of work comprises a dynamic and mutable “ecology of selves.” This phrase is borrowed from anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, whose book How Forests Think (2013), based on several years of fieldwork with the Runa people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, questions what Kohn terms “our central assumptions about what it means to be human-and thus distinct from all other life forms.” Ramakrishnan's paintings, too, seed important dreams about the evolution of a multispecies personhood.
Two house crows look keenly back at us in the portrait One Red Blood (2024). One of them pinches the tail of a dangling pink rat in its beak, and even the poor rodent is possessed of a pitiful charisma. Around the birds' feet glides a horde of garden snails, each one jewel-like in its detail. Humans are found here too, in the interlocking arms and clasped hands that encircle the edge of the painting. As is often the case with Ramakrishnan's work, the human form plays a supporting role here, holding together the picture plane for other worthy protagonists.
Crows are part of a distinguished family on the tree of life, the Corvids, a diverse group of birds, also including ravens and magpies, which are found around the world. Social, resourceful, voraciously omnivorous, and very comfortable in urban environments, they possess an intelligence that has always been recognized by humans, who often credit them as “among the smartest non-human animals.” Across deeper scales of time, Corvids are central figures in mythology, often appearing as tricksters who play a pivotal role in bestowing humans with consciousness, or bearing messages across borders between worlds, as heard in story traditions from the Pacific Northwest to the mountains of Nepal.
Somewhere between those mytho-geographic poles, in northern Europe, the Germanic deity Óðinn was said to have derived much of his power from an alliance with two ravens, whose vision he could borrow to gather knowledge from distant places and even across time. Óðinn had only one eye of his own, signifying his limited abilities of knowing and perceiving. His omniscience was due to his raven allies, who would fly around the world, returning to him to tell what they had learned. The Old Norse names of these birds, Munin and Hugin, mean “mind” and “memory.”
As an all-knowing father figure, Óðinn was a clear prototype of the monotheistic God that came to dominate European religion in the age of agriculture, on whose authority Man was ordained the master of all other creatures, dividing the world into rigid domains of human and nonhuman. But the raven consorts Munin and Hugin represent a more complex cosmology, bespeaking a more ancient character. They embody important ecological knowledge, which would be lost in the tide of western humanism: “mind” and “memory” are multi-species affairs.
Every native story tradition emphasizes the ways that humans evolved by learning from and relying intimately upon the intelligences of other species. In the worldview of the Piegan Blackfeet, humans are thought to be the only creatures that don't possess innate supernatural powers, meaning that alliances with more magical beings, like the beaver and the crow, are necessary for obtaining any sacred knowledge. The highest mark of magical power in the Piegan world, as in many traditional societies, is being able to speak with and even transform into one's animal teacher. Oftentimes this work takes place in dreams. As documented in Kohn's How Forests Think, the Runa people's waking and dreaming encounters with animals are important events for understanding inner and outer worlds.
Shape-shifting and talking to animals don't mesh with a worldview that fundamentally divides the human from the nonhuman, and thus these ideas have long been relegated to the status of superstition and folklore in western culture. But what do we make of them now, as we awaken in the dreaming of a post-humanist age? “Multispecies ethnography” is a term now used to describe an emerging field of western scholarship that recuperates conceptual frameworks for more-than-human cultures. It is a field mostly indebted to knowledge preserved by indigenous teachers and increasingly amplified by postcolonial academics like Kohn, Deborah Bird Rose, David Abram, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Anna Lowhenput Tsing, among others.
Ramakrishnan's work as an artist is part of this transhistorical shift in consciousness. In her painting Once the World Was Perfect (2024), two lions sleep beside each other under the setting sun, captured in a state of intimate vulnerability. Though this is the largest piece in the artist's new body of work, it exudes a secret bliss and opulence that recalls Persian miniature painting, an art form designed to be kept in a special album and looked at privately. Beneath the feline sleepers, in the black earth below their bodies-or, more likely, in the symbolic underworld of their dreaming-glides a parade of technicolor snails.
In recent decades, as neuroscience has accumulated great importance in our understanding of mind and personhood, significant resources have been devoted to the investigation of whether or not other animals actually dream. The absurdity of this question is symptomatic of a human culture that believes its own experience of life is fundamentally more complex than that of other species. On the other hand, scientific research is actively unraveling this immodest subjectivity, as evidence of the shared phenomena of consciousness accumulates. Spiders are now observed experiencing rapid eye-movement and leg-twitching while they sleep suspended from silk threads in laboratories. It has been proven that even jellyfish sleep, although they possess no “brain” in the conventional sense. Snails dream, too-or at least, they sleep, and a key purpose of sleep-states as speculated by researchers, even in animals of stable and slow-moving metabolisms like gastropods, is to allow for the integration of memories and waking experiences. This process likely plays a key role in our behavioral evolution.
“Modern” humans have, for the most part, forgotten the significance of dreaming, if not how to dream altogether. But in traditional knowledge systems, dreaming is the principal medium through which to access an extended consciousness. It is also a way to communicate directly with members of other species, for in the shared territory of dreams we are less constrained by the bodily divides that prevent us from understanding one another-including the divide of life and death. Dreaming can manifest a kind of timeless, shapeless mind and memory, shared by an ecology of selves.
And so rediscovering dreaming is inextricably linked to the recovery of multispecies consciousness, meaning that artists have an important role to play in the process. In her studio, Ramakrishnan has a small wire armature of a lion, modeled in paraffin wax. It's a reference for her painting that is far more practical than observing real lions, and curiously more vital than the undead specimens that could be found in a taxidermy library or zoo. The rough little model is quite alive, animated by her hands and the warmth of heated tools on the wax. For the artist, sculpting, drawing, and painting are means to embody the lion, to touch it, to make it more than an abstraction or a picture in a book, more than an object of the human gaze. Like dreaming, art is a medium for shapeshifting.
Another way of understanding shapeshifting is as an evolutionary process. We have much to learn from other beings; as species go, Homo sapiens is a much younger cousin to the lion, the crow, and the snake, the latter of whom appears in Ramakrishnan's painting Rains That Open (2024). To say that it is a painting of a snake would merely return to the trap of restricting subjectivity to the human and its closest available analogues. Lest we forget that plants are also dreamers, Helianthus and Alstroemeria flowers obscure and weave around the body of the snake in this work, sheltering her as she begins to shed her skin. Ramakrishnan has painted the plants in a vivid impasto that pushes them forward into fleshy being. A film of the snake's scales catches on the stems of these green siblings, aiding her in the intimate task known as ecdysis.
I have often thought about how much contact a snake's body makes with the earth as it undulates through grass and soil and rocks, and how many other organisms it must touch as it moves using the friction of its muscle and skin against the next available surface. Humans locomote on long limbs that elevate the sensorium from the ground, making it possible to imagine one's self as a pair of floating eyeballs, separate from all other things. For the snake, however, the self/other boundary is but a membrane. Maybe this is part of why they spend so much time motionless; any movement may involve an overload of intimacy.
This speculation runs counter to the modern stereotype that snakes lack emotion, an assumption based on differences in our brain structures. But recent research is dispelling the rumor of the reptile-brain. By measuring the adrenal hormones of rattlesnakes, one study determined that their stress levels drop significantly when entwined with other individuals of their own species, causing variations of “rattlesnakes love to cuddle” to make headlines in 2022. However clinical or clumsy, these revelations rebuild trust in the knowledge that differently-embodied organisms possess diverse forms, but not lesser degrees, of mindfulness. Multispecies consciousness is primarily about recognizing what other life forms have to teach us, and not only those whose intelligence closely resembles our own, like Corvids. The serpent is symbolically linked to mystic knowledge-traditions worldwide, because it is the teacher who can't escape the knowing that all beings are connected.
But what does it mean to dream of snails, like the lions in Ramakrishnan's painting? Gastropods are not so widely admired as spiritual teachers. And yet they carry the shape of the galaxy on their backs, and have done so for at least 400 million years. One of the first life forms to leave the sea, they have survived the past five mass extinctions. I'd say a dream of snails is a message about evolution, and a reminder that adaptation is a spiral force. It turns back on itself, ever vital, as we recover and re-imagine our selves. For humans, as the historical arc of separation and uniqueness inevitably leads to our profound loneliness as a species, we are yet called back home.
Alex A. Jones writes on art, ecology, and the occult. In 2022 she received the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Award for her project "Art and Ecology in the Third Millennium," and she is the inaugural recipient in 2024 of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation Grant for Writing on Sculpture. She is a co-creator of collaborative projects including the Queer Ecologies Research Collective and the film collective VIROSA. She studied art history, theory, and criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Notes:
1. Raven/Crow appears as the bringer of fire (representing the spark of life/desire/consciousness) in folklore of the Pacific Northwest; for a Haida perspective, see Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst, The Raven Steals the Light, 2nd ed. (University of Washington Press, 1996). Throughout much of Asia, the Crow is revered as an intercessor between the realms of the dead and the living; see the strong associations in Indian and Himalayan visual art between crows and deities associated with death/destruction/rebirth, such as Mahakala, Dhumavati, and Chamundi; in preparation for writing this piece, the artist also told me about the common belief in India that crows are the visiting spirits of deceased relatives.
2. For in-depth exploration of the Norse mythology of Hugin and Munin, see the well-cited research of Dr. Alexander Cummins on his blog QUOTH, in articles such as "Hallowed to Hrafnaguð," 2023. https://quoth.substack.com/p/hallowed-to-hrafnagu.
3. David Abram suggests that "Mind arises, and dwells, between the body and the earth, and hence is as much an attribute of this leafing world as of our own immodest species." Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Penguin Random House, 2011), 111.
4. Rosalyn R. LaPier, "The Piegan View of the Natural World, 1880-1920," PhD dissertation (The University of Montana, 2015).
5. See Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming (2011); David Abram, Becoming Animal (2011) Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013); and Anna Lowhenput Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015).
6. On jumping spiders, see Juan Siliezar, "Harvard Researchers Find REM Sleep in Jumping Spiders" in The Harvard Gazette, August 2022. On jellyfish, see Ravi D. Nath et al, "The Jellyfish Cassiopea Exhibits a Sleep-like State," in Current Biology, Volume 27, Issue 19: 2984-2990.e3. On gastropods, see R. Stephenson and V. Lewis, "Behavioural evidence for a sleep-like a sleep-like quiescent state in a pulmonate mollusc, Lymnaea stagnalis (Linnaeus)" in The Journal of Experimental Biology, Volume 214, Issue 5: 747-756.
