In Navjot?s first exhibition of sculpture-installations, ?Images Redrawn? (1996), we entered a transit zone that invoked many different sites: it was part street, part archive and part museum. The floor plan of the exhibition alluded to streets and intersections. Dominating these rudimentary streets or sitting at imagined crossroads were archetypal mother goddesses that recalled the sacred power and beauty of Mayan and Olmec sculptures from Mexico. These chthonic blue and red figures, displaying conspicuous vaginas, full breasts, flared nostrils and deep-set eyes, appeared to have stepped out of a museum. They drew attention to their hands, which were bereft of fate lines (?I have no fate lines, thank god?), and tried to read an undecipherable script on a mortar long used to grind Indian spices or masalas (?Yes I want to read?). It was a magical experience in visual and morphological translation to see form and meaning slip between goddess and everywoman, between monumentality and feminist rhetoric. The work that best demonstrates this slippage is ?Palani?s Daughters?, in which an earth- and blood-soiled body writhes in pain among vaginal pods. Made in response to the accelerating statistics of female infanticide, the reference for this sculpture was a Mayan mother goddess giving birth. In Navjot?s handling, Palani?s archetypal power gains contemporary relevance. The French feminist Luce Irigaray?s celebration of ?sexual difference? had a talismanic effect on her. ?Palani?s Daughters? speaks to Irigaray?s discontent with a society that reduces women to machines of reproduction and further discriminates on the basis of a child?s gender: ?Women, who have given life and growth to the other within themselves, are excluded from the order of the same which men alone set up. The girl child, although conceived by a man and a woman does not enter society as the father?s child with the same status as that accorded the son. She remains outside culture, kept as a natural body good only for procreation.