Seeds of Love: The Story Behind the Painting | Dharshi

In times when the world's chaos threatens to overwhelm us, when news cycles spin with problems too vast to comprehend and despair feels like the only rational response, I find myself returning to the earth beneath my feet. This grounding connection offers solace and clarity.

This painting, Seeds of Love, is a botanical contact painting that emerged from that return. It reflects my observations of silver birch trees rooting themselves deeper each season. I've come to understand that what we see above ground, the graceful branches and papery bark, is only half the story.

The Hidden World Beneath

Beneath the surface exists an entirely different world: a hidden network of roots and mycorrhizal threads. These elements communicate, share resources, and support one another in ways we're only beginning to understand. Scientists call it the "wood wide web." I call it nature's reminder that connection is survival.

The painting reveals this underground landscape through eco-printed birch leaves. Their ghostly impressions are transferred onto canvas through steam, carrying the memory of what nourished them: sunlight, rain, soil, and time. Each botanical mark is a testament to life lived above ground, now feeding the network below.

The Witnessing Eyes

The eyes scattered throughout this underground landscape aren't watching in judgment, they're witnessing. They bear testimony. Each one represents a seed of awareness, a point of consciousness connected to all the others through invisible threads.

These universal symbols emerged organically through the painting process. They echo Miró's dreams, Aboriginal songlines, and Sri Lankan mandalas. Ancient wisdom meets botanical reality, reminding us that this understanding isn't new. Indigenous cultures and mystics have always known what modern science is rediscovering: we are not isolated. We are networked. Our roots entangle.

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The Practice of Tending

What if the solution to our overwhelming world isn't to solve every problem at once, but to tend our own underground network? Master chefs understand this instinctively. They don't try to master every cuisine simultaneously. Instead, they focus on the ingredients before them, treating each element with reverence. They trust that excellence in the particular creates something universally nourishing. Their discipline isn't about control, it's about attention.

My birch tree doesn't worry about every tree in every forest. It simply grows, drops its leaves to feed the soil, and extends its roots to connect with its neighbours. In doing so, it participates in something larger than itself.

Seeds of Love is my meditation on this truth: what looks like disconnected problems above ground are actually interconnected beneath the surface. The eyes opening in the darkness aren't signs of surveillance or threat, but of awakening, each small consciousness finding others, forming networks of care and mutual support.

In chaos, we don't need to fix everything. We need to tend our patch, extend our roots, and trust the underground network.

Plant your seeds of love, whatever form they take. Attention. Kindness. Creative work. Honest conversation. Each act of care creates connections we cannot see but which sustain the whole system. Like my birch tree, we participate in forests we may never fully comprehend, but which depend on our willingness to root down and reach out.

The Making of Seeds of Love

Seeds of Love began, as all my botanical contact paintings do, with an act of collaboration between my hands and the dying bodies of plants. I gathered birch leaves from my weeping silver birch, pomegranate dropped on the ground at my neighbour's nature strip, pittosporum leaves collected after the hedges were trimmed, and eucalyptus flowers that caught my eye on my walks in nature. All these elements are scattered across canvas that had been mordanted with soy milk.

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Through three hours of steam printing, the leaves and blossoms released their essence. Their final portraits bonded permanently with the canvas. What emerged was a network of botanical impressions, some bold, some barely visible, creating the texture of an underground world.

Then came days of embellishment with soft pastels. I followed the eyes as they revealed themselves across this hidden landscape, building a sense of interconnected consciousness, of witnessing, of seeds of awareness taking root in darkness.

The painting underwent two rounds of steaming and multiple iterations before finding its final form. Each layer deepened the sense that something vital and alive exists beneath what we can see.

Materials

Mixed media botanical contact painting with birch on canvas.

Exhibition

Seeds of Love was part of Return to Eden, a solo show held last year at Mystik River Gallery, Melbourne.

If you'd like to see Seeds of Love in person, contact me about preview appointments. This is a one-of-a-kind original work available for collection.

With gratitude for your presence in this creative network,

Dharshi