Find Your Sunflower
- Nakul Sahnan
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Over the last few years, my practice has become less about making and more about understanding.
I’ve realised that in order to have an honest conversation with an audience, you have to first sit with yourself, long enough to trace where your emotions come from.
Not the surface-level reactions, but their origin.
For me, that search kept leading me back to a garden.
I must have been very young. I remember holding a small watering can, moving between flowers and bees, completely absorbed in a world that didn’t ask anything of me except attention.
Somewhere in that memory, there’s a fragment about sunflowers.
I don’t know if I was told that they turn toward each other on rainy days, or if I saw it somewhere as a child. Memory isn’t always reliable like that. But the feeling stayed.
The idea that something rooted, something seemingly still, could choose connection.
Could turn, not toward the sun but toward another.
I found myself returning to that thought often, without fully understanding why.
It wasn’t until much later, during a difficult period in my life, that it began to make sense.
The sunflower, to me, became less about the plant and more about a decision.
A quiet, internal shift.
The choice to seek strength even on days when it isn’t obvious.
The choice to turn toward something that grounds you.
The choice to not remain still in your struggle.
When I eventually translated this into a painting, the image that emerged was unexpected.
A bouquet of flowers, held close
as if resting in my own arms.
I didn’t question it while I was making it. But afterwards, I had to sit with it.
"Why that image?
Why that memory?
Why did it feel like they
were facing me?"
I don’t think I arrived at a clear answer.
But I realised something had shifted.
The idea of strength stopped feeling external.
It wasn’t something to search for endlessly, or prove.
It felt closer than that.
“Find your Sunflower” isn’t about discovering something new.
It’s about noticing what’s already there.
The small moments of curiosity.
The quiet pulls.
The things that make you feel like yourself without effort.
Those are your sunflowers.
And maybe strength isn’t something you build all at once.
Maybe it’s just the act of turning toward them
again and again.
"“Find Your Sunflower” began as a way of understanding where strength comes from not as something we find, but something we return to."
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