In 5 Seconds Later, 2009, Kurulkar creates a grid of photographic self-portraits (a single unfired clay face-cast) and a gap of five seconds to map her dissolution. She activates impressions of her face cast in clay, alternately reviving them and letting them erode into unrecognizable form: an experiment in reversing time. Hence staging a dust-to-dust scenario in a very literal sense. Her works attempt to engage the viewer in confronting and accepting death by controlling the fear of its eventuality and by yielding the physical body t o its eventual demise and disintegration. Although Kurulkar casts her own body, it is erased of all discerning character as it is subjected to death-inducing processes. As a result, her bodies, in their various states of break-down and dis-existence become stand-ins for any body: male or female, young or old, ravaged or beautiful. It is in these in-between states that her works embody most powerfully her preoccupation with life becoming death and cycling back. It is also in this most abject and unrecognizable state of decomposition that her bodies attain a paradoxical degree of monumentality. The absence of form, and of life force speaks volumes of the ine vitable forces that made them iner t. Clay as a material appropriately lends itself to the theme of transience in the very manner in which it reacts to and interacts with the elements. The fragility of the material is a perfect counterfoil to the very dense forms into which Kurulkar moulds her bodies. She fascinatingly uses Clay as a metaphor for manifestations of a living body, but also a s manifestations of the body a s stilled by death.