"Dari opens with a rock, a poetic metaphor for the coalescing of a million particles or points of origin (‘from’s), compressed through time in a single, solid object. This unassuming object is what links us to the stars and galaxies; in its enduring mass it spans eons, bridging the present with the past. It is the stuff of the universe, a perfect encapsulation of the macro-cosmos in the micro, the one-in-many and the many-in-one. Shaped into monuments, temples and steles, it carries humanity’s attempts to inscribe the divine, to worship and commemorate.

The body or ‘being’ ⁵ are also composed from particles – a million measures of time, images, shapes and colours of memory held in our soul, the possessions and heirlooms that define us and our origins, passed from one generation to the next. Sebastianus honors this lineage in works that combine two generational methods of image-making: photographic print and batik⁶, the avanese wax-resist dye technique. These works, which the artist describes as ‘studies’, investigate the shape of ‘being’, its many layers, and its constitution. Pixelated image-particles, representative of memories and belongings, are imprinted on cloth and waxed over, before the cloth is then dipped into dye. This batik process is an apt metaphor for unveiling, as the wax holds the initial image imprinted onto the fabric, resisting the dye that otherwise shrouds the rest of the textile in darkness."