Silent Cities: The Data of a Disappearing Sparrow

What does absence sound like? For me, it is the fading chatter of the house sparrow.

As our cities grow louder with the mechanical roar of progress - traffic, construction, and digital white noise; they are simultaneously falling biologically silent. This work explores the "missing frequency" in our urban soundscape: the disappearance of a bird that was once the heartbeat of the Indian home.

During my childhood, sparrows were constant - nesting in window grills, claiming courtyards, and blurring the line between the wild and the domestic. Today, spotting one feels like a fleeting miracle - a spark of joy shadowed by a mounting, quiet grief.

This project translates ecological trauma into physical, material expression using acrylic and/ or oil. Rather than digital charts, I am encoding environmental stressors directly into the topography of the canvas:

• Impasto Density: Heavy paint thickness as a direct index of population peaks.
• Knife-Stroke Fragmentation: Violent, directional strokes mapping urban disruption and habitat fracture.
• Color Desaturation: Muted, "fading" tones signaling ecosystem stress and loss of vitality over time.
• Layer Erosion: Physically scraped and scarred surfaces representing the loss of traditional nesting sites.
• Spatial Void: Increasing "white space" or emptiness across the canvas to map the decline from the 1990s to the present.

By bridging scientific metrics with lived memory, the work asks a haunting question: If the rural heartland also falls silent, where does the memory of the sparrow go?