The Acquisition Of "Water As A Portal" | Suryah Studio

It’s 2:03 pm on December 7th, 2025, and I’ve just found out that a private collector has acquired my piece “Water As A Portal” (2025). “Water As A Portal” was a really special piece that I specifically created for the S.T.E.M to Studio Exhibition within Gallery Re-Imagined in Baltimore City. I already wrote about that in Studio Note: Water As A Portal for Gallery Re-Imagined, so that I won’t sit too much in that space. I felt really reassured when I was notified about the acquisition because, to be honest, a massive goal for me this year was actually to be selling work. Which feels like something so obvious when I attempt to critique from a position I imagine is outside of myself, but on the inside, in my subconscious self, I felt that maybe that was something I may not actually be able to do, which makes me even more anxious about every other investment I’m making in this practice. Because in my mind, why invest so much in this if you can’t even sell work? It’s such a crazy feedback loop that's always felt easy to get caught up in and sometimes completely lost in. But coming back to this work in 2025, I was really firm with myself that I would not be a prisoner of this practice and that I do not deserve suffering as a constant condition to maintain any of this, which meant really doing the work necessary to start confronting all of the insecurities that I felt would put my relationship with this work in jeopardy. I’ve worked too hard on myself to submit to the parts of myself that still need the most work.

I want to be an artist who sells their work to earn money. I do not feel bad about wearing that on my sleeve. I want people to engage with my work and develop profound and transformative relationships with it. I also want to be monetarily compensated for my offerings and labor. That want does exist in the same realm as the morals, values, and ethics I attempt to carry across the many different practices of my life. When I think about the pricing of my work, I consider the many other realities of the work. The context, the size, the materials, the intended audience, and my personal connection to the work are always on my mind. I feel like I’m also just looking for people to want the work. I want people to have the work, but giving it away for free is not something I can regularly accommodate anymore. “Water As A Portal” was acquired for the full retail price of $500. Hitting goals like that also makes me feel more comfortable with the idea of increasing the prices of my work by a certain percentage after each acquisition, giving me some space to grow the practice as demand for more work increases.

I also want to use acquisitions as a container to get more personal and more in-depth with the work and the space it will eventually exist in, for what I hope is a really long time. I’m still not exactly sure what the “what” is, but I know I want people to have something that makes them feel special and considered. An experience that I have frequently and enjoy very much is the conversations with people at markets and exhibitions who see my work and start talking to me about their own experiences with natural dates, whether that’s projects they have already begun, hopes for colors and fibers they want to work with in the future, or some other venture that’s on their heart. It feels like such a privilege to make things that people can use as containers to express themselves in and through, in such a vulnerable way. I can’t even count how many recipes, websites, notes, and pieces of advice I’ve written down on business cards and loose napkins for people just looking to try something they’ve never done before or done in this way.

A better ending for this would be nice, but this is all I have at the moment…