The Samita Sen exhibit was pretty cool. I’ve seen her work on display and it’s pretty interesting. I definitely resonate with her interpretive dance about how grief moves and affects the body. And seeing her other works such as the miniature sand garden and the music that accompanied it was very zen in a way. But it also was very sad which aligns with grief. And I think the idea of grief is very interesting because there are commonly known as 5 stages. Later on psychologists added more and gave the existing ones depth, but let’s just focus on the 5 for now. Those stages are as follows: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Denial is essentially the stage of shock which affects the body because your body as a whole slows down. Because it analyzes the fact that what/who you love is gone.  Anger is self explanatory and how it affects the body is that you use a lot of energy to become angry, but anger unlike the other stage is a much more productive feeling. Bargaining is your mind and body giving you some sort of hope that you may buy back whatever/whoever you lost, Depression is the sorrow, hopelessness, emptiness as well as a whole bunch of other emotions and how it affects the body is restlessness, sleep pattern changes, changes in appetite, etc. And the following stage is finally acceptance. This is when you and your body come to the realization that what you lost can not be brought back. Grief is a series of emotions that affects everyone differently at different rates depending on who’s dealing with grief and what they are grieving over. And I feel like Samitas work perfectly captures that series as her dance follows the stages of grief. In addition to that Samita also visited my studio in senior studio. Her advice was slightly helpful. She told me to move away from steampunk stuff for my Dwarven country Karkurus which I didn’t find helpful. Outside of that I could tell she was engaged with my world and she tried to give me helpful advice. Though I did understand some of her feedback which was to move away from steampunk stuff and make Karkurus gear more like Star Wars because starwars has unique gear. But I think where the problem lies is that my world is fantasy while star wars is sci fi fantasy. While I like science fiction I’m way more of a fan of fantasy and that’s what I want to write about and draw stuff on. Now I do have a theme in my world of magic versus technology and they both eventually come together to form “magitech”, but thats in the very distant future of my world and by then it will become more like a sci fi than fantasy, but for the time being my world will very much be a fantasy setting with varying degrees of history involved.