Navigating the Field Guide
An Invitation Into Imagined Worlds
It’s been fifteen years. Fifteen years of wandering, wondering, and building imaginary worlds!
Always in a rush, flitting from one thing to the other, we tend to move through the world quickly. We recognize what we already know, name what feels familiar, and often overlook the strange, the improbable, and the quietly extraordinary.
Yet beyond what first meets the eye are worlds that refuse easy categorization, tiny ecosystems, unexpected relationships, curious forms, and moments of wonder waiting for someone to pause, waiting to be noticed.
When I first shared my art online fifteen years back, there was no plan or roadmap. Just an overwhelming urge to draw, paint, experiment and see where those impulses took me.
Curiosity has been the guiding light through all of my art practice. Curiosity about biology and natural history. About chaos theory, adaptation and evolution. About the improbable creatures that inhabit fairytales, folk lore, memory, dreams, and childhood. And about the strange overlap between science and art.
What I didn’t know then, was that I wasn’t just creating individual artworks at random. I was slowly mapping a landscape, following a breadcrumb trail through all the moments that have most fascinated me. I was building a world.
After fifteen years of charting these imagined worlds, I’ve finally built the Field Guide I wish had existed right from the start, a place to explore otherwordly landscapes, organisms, curiosities, and stories that have emerged along the way.
Not a field guide that explains the world.
But one that encourages us to look at it a little differently.
Inside the Field Guide
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Like any field guide, this one rewards curiosity.
This Field Guide is an invitation to practice a different kind of observation, one that is rooted in curiosity, imagination, and the possibility that the world is always stranger, richer, and more interconnected than it first appears.
Whether you’ve been here since that very first Facebook post in 2012 or are visiting for the first time, I hope you’ll take your time. The Field Guide wasn’t designed to be rushed. It is built for slow looking, unexpected detours, and quiet discoveries.
Wander through landscapes, examine specimens, uncover curiosities, and browse the field notes that document the ideas behind the work.
Alien Landscapes
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The heart of my practice, this is an ongoing series of mixed media paintings that imagine speculative ecosystems where mutation, adaptation, and interdependence shape worlds that feel both strangely familiar and wonderfully alien.
Specimens
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Individual works collected like entries in a natural history archive, they’re imagined species, hybrid organisms, and curious forms extracted from my ever evolving ecosystems.
Curiosities
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Collected fragments, miniature worlds, and playful mutations that emerge from the stranger edges of the Alien Landscapes.
Field Notes
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A journal of studio observations, experiments, exhibitions, works in progress, and the evolving ideas behind the practice.
Beyond The Picture Plane
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Spatial Studies
Exhibition environments and installations that explore how these imagined ecologies might inhabit architectural space, extending the work beyond the picture plane into immersive experiences.
An Invitation
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We live in a world that constantly asks us to move faster. To scroll. To consume. To move on.
This Field Guide asks something different.
It an invitation to linger. To look closely. To notice unlikely connections. To embrace curiosity. To wander without needing to know exactly where we’re going.
If it encourages even one person to look at the natural world, or the imagined one, with a little more wonder and attention, then it has already fulfilled its purpose.
The Field Guide is Open
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The Field Guide can be explored on any device, but like walking through a landscape, some paths reveal themselves more fully when you have the time, and a larger screen through which to look.
EXPLORE THE FIELD GUIDE
www.asmakazi.in
In the grand scheme of things, fifteen years is both a long time and only the beginning.
Thank you for every conversation, exhibition visit, message, acquisition, collaboration, and word of encouragement over the years. Art to me has always felt like a dialogue rather than a monologue, and I’m grateful to everyone who has chosen to be part of it. Your support has allowed this practice to grow in ways I never anticipated, and I’m deeply grateful to have you along for the journey.
I’m so excited to share this next chapter with you. Thank you for being a part of the enchantment.
<3
*This writing first appeared in the FIELD NOTES No. 001 – An Invitation Into Imagined Worlds. You can subscribe to the Field Notes – notes from the field, glimpses from the studio, material experiments, sketches, exhibition sand processes that shape the evolution of these surreal landscapes here.
More Field Notes
- On Frogs, Hot Springs & Dangerous Illusions
- A walk through Cool Creek Park
- When is an artwork complete?
- Cartographies Of Mischief
- The Usual Suspects
- Everybody’s Elsewhere