In ‘A Gap in the Void’, 2011, Yardena Kurulkar has constructed an iron rack displaying, in a laboratory-like manner, 42 sculptural ceramic casts of her own head. The heads hold their breath, fighting death. They vary in postures signifying diverse stages of the fight. The glass boxes enclosing the heads are filled with water and sealed with a layer of oil. It is a documentation of an artist’s poignant struggle to achieve a balance between the fear of death and the hope for survival; a record of the changing years in a series of 42 heads.

“These heads are cast from a single mold but treated differently every time. The features are blurred in some, defined in some, the faces wrapped in some and dented in others. One has journal writings carved on the surface, while another may have a mask on it. The 42 heads, each created by using a cast of my face, are submerged in water, which is sheathed with a layer of oil, not allowing it to evaporate, bringing near that sense of claustrophobia, of breathlessness.” - Yardena Kurulkar

‘A Gap in the Void’ was created in an attempt to confront and accept death by controlling the fear of its eventuality. The work deals with Yardena‘s study of man's denial of death even as he fights hopefully for life; how the certainty of dying betrays life’s fragility. It becomes an attempt to capture that mixed emotion of fear and hope. The artist confronts childhood incidents, phobias and emotions pulled out from memory by transferring them as an outcome of her artistic practice. With the notion of the ever-present ephemeral, Kurulkar’s art creates an inquiry into the manner in which, the beauty of the human condition lies in eternal suspension between life and death. In Yardena's works, life and death, resurrection and ending, beginnings and finality-exist simultaneously as she attempts to harness both sets of paradoxes in one ideological framework.