“The gods are neither lewd nor prudish. Such notions are human.” – R. Rai/L. Frederik,
Khajuraho”

“My new work consists of low and high reliefs modeled in clay and cast as wallpieces. The series
of erotic and erotological sketches is the visual component of field research done on a pilgrimage to
the holy erotic temples in the village of Khajuraho in northern India in 2008. Khajuraho was once
a religious capital, the holy city of the rajahs of the Chandella dynasty, whose rulers descended
from a mythical sage who was “born of the moon”. Built around the 10th century, there are more
than a dozen temples whose exteriors are embellished with erotic imagery, remains of an ancient
religion that believes in sex as a vehicle to the Divine.

Like Lotus from the mud, the wet tactile medium of earthen clay brought my chosen images to life,
decontextualizing them into the Now and Here. Being an ardent student of the tantras and longtime
lover of the human form, I was in bliss as I recreated some inspiring scenes, zooming into
particular details in extreme close-up and syncretizing these through the church windows of my
catholic girlhood. Once in a while it’s good to reexamine our attitude to sexuality. Why so much
confusion and fear? Beyond the bliss, there is a stong message, which I cannot say as eloquently as
Alan Watts did in the 70’s: ‘We are dangerously insane and making ready to commit global suicide
because we have separated the spiritual from the sexual, and the conceptual from the real.
Obviously, only those who believe that the world of spirit is more real than the world of life, biology
and sex will gamble on detonating the atomic bomb’ ” - Agnes Arellano, 2010