These ceramic Palimpsests / book platters series are layered and never entirely clean. Bisque-fired and baked on with sugar cookies and meetha parathas, they record every mark: sugar browns like text written in heat, taste over text, comfort over collapse. The Palimpsests are interacted with during book readings… Reading them means tasting chemistry, witnessing accumulation, sensing fragility and contemplating collapsology. Reading them also means confronting what is left after the sweet consumption.
In cookies and parathas, as with other foods where reducing sugars combine with certain amino acids, the color and the aroma is peculiarly interesting. What we crave is the Maillard reaction. These sugars meet amino acids, molecules rearrange, break, recombine. Some compounds brown food, others rise as aroma, promising comfort before the first bite.
But heat also creates acrylamide, a toxic byproduct of the Maillard Reaction. Comfort quietly tips into collapse; in the air, in the body. Collapsology reminds us: what sustains us; sugar, fire, warmth… can, in excess, undo us. A browning cookie as well as a browning earth.
Golden. Brown. Delicious.
