Walking Into the Light

So now I am in the fourth week of being in Godawari. Some of the bangle sculptures have been completed by the girls and we have been making animals, clay on a metal armature, so that we can create part moulds for repeat casting. All useful skills. The director of the charity returned to Nepal this week and this morning we met with a contact of his who is opening a shop in Kathmandu, just the day I fly from Delhi ironically. She is interested in selling mosaics and ceramics and anything else the girls make. Much to my delight she was very taken with the bangle sculptures and we talked about what sort of figures we could make, woman carrying baskets and water carriers. I now feel filled with enthusiasm, but realise that the large scale naga (snake sculpture) is probably out of the question. Last week there was a naga festival and pictures of nagas appeared on everyone’s gates, including ours. I am still pursuing ideas about these potent fertility symbols. I have been told that there are many stories of snakes coming in the form of women and luring men into relationains with them. They then turn in snakes again. The daughters of nagas are half woman half snake and called Naga Kanya. I am pleased that in some way the work that I am creating with the girls is relating to ideas that are circulating in my mind for my own work.

So now in the third week at Godawari, it has been an interesting time, the girls have started to make sculptures that we can stick broken glass bangles on. This has involved making proper armatures, padding them with polystyrene and wrapping muslin dipped in plaster round this to make a basic structure. Monday was quite mad as I had some girls at the plaster stage and some at the armature in wire stage. The result is a solid bag of plaster and a blocked sink. Last Friday, myself and three girls, went into Patan, to Mangle Bazaar, to buy more Bangles than the old couple running the stall have ever sold before. Monday morning we smashed them all! I got my video camera out for the first time since I have been here to record this event. I feel that this footage could become part of some work, footage of several Nepali girls crouching on the floor smashing these beautiful bangles with rolling pins, there seems to be some symbolism in this action. Even the way that Mumta was scooping up the pieces and putting them in a box, it had a similar action to sorting rice or beans. I have been making some sketchs for a Naga (snake) woman sculpture that we could construct in the same way that we have made the smaller sculptures. Working on this collaboratively, making a larger structure. Nagas are worshiped by women and are associated with fertility. Speaking of fertility and as I have mentioned before the obvious symbolism of Hinduism on Sunday we visited the Siva temple in Patan, there the pujari was performing rites around a Siva Lingham, decorated with flowers and fruit. A pan of water was dripping onto the Siva Lingham from above. It reminded me again of the ceremony that we had witnessed in Utterkarshi, with the newly married couple pouring milk over the Lingham. I hope that what I am teaching the girls is useful to them, I think that they are learning useful skills. I am exited by the idea of collaborating with them. It is quite strange as I rarely make real sculptures these days and actually it is quite pleasurable playing with plaster and clay.

So entering the second week in Godawari. Getting used to working with the girls now, even if the ones that I worked with last week were the Mosaic Girls, ie the girls who are employed to make mosaics, not the Project Girls, who are the newer girls that I am supposed to be working with. Anyway we had fun and they worked very hard, producing some lovely things. I am now working with the Project Girls, I am trying to introduce them to the difference between 2d and 3d. Also to the idea of creating shapes in a more abstract way, rather than always copying things. Some of them have responded really well to this. Attention spans are short and we will have to work on developing things. This seems normal for girls of their age though. We keep trying to take them to the Museum in Patan to do some drawing, but as there is a severe fuel crisis here at the moment it has not been possible. The other challenge is to teach with a minute amount of Nepali, and a tiny bit of Hindi, a lot of sign language. However teaching by example seems the best policy anyway. I have some company, or I should say some one to speak English to, not just bad Hindi/Nepali. Lexa, another volunteer from the UK has joined me. She will be teaching ceramics. It does mean, that with a trip to Kathmandu at the weekend, I have not been thinking a great deal about any of my own work. However, today, I have started to teach the girls to make sculptures starting with a proper armature. As some of them had made figures and wanted to put some mosaic on them I decided to show them some photos from the Nec Chand Rock Garden in Chandigarh. As I had hoped they were very exited by the idea of making sculptures with broken bangles on them. As I have been thinking about the Bangle sculpture I would like to make I think that we may collaborate to make a large sculpture in the garden here.

So, I have been in Godawari for 3 days now. It feels like a lot longer, after the frenzy of travel in India and the Holiday in Kathmandu, life has slowed right down.

I have started working with a group of about 8 girls, we have been exploring 3d form, first by modelling vegetables and odd objects out of clay. Then I bought some ornaments down in the village and they copied those. I am amazed at their facillity for modelling in 3d.

I have been busy with that and trying to learn rudimentry Nepali as you can imagine, but have also had time to think about the pilgrimage and my own work.

I have had an idea ever since I was in Chennai Museum and saw memorials to victims of Sati (widow burning) on which they hung glass bangles, of making a bangle sculpture. As I sat in the garden this morning I thought why not here, there is a Bangle shop at the end of the path. It seems a fitting place, most of these girls lost their childhood in a violent way.

There are other sculptures I have been thinking about, but I wonder if using the very blatent, obvious symbolism of sexuality that appears in Hindu sculpture and rituals may seem a bit crass in our (seemingly) more sophisticated art world. But this kind of symbolism is the essence of life. For example when we visited a temple in Uttarkarshi we saw a newly wed couple pouring Milk over the Siva Lingum (the phallic symbol of the god Siva). Obvious, but none the less a beautiful action, the lingum was covered in flowers, which were also coated in milk. It made me think of Helen Chadwick's photos of flowers, which I believe she coated in milk to make them look right for the camera.

I am still trying to walk everyday as well, as a way of thinking. The idea of pilgrimage and the idea of physical activety to excercise the mind, today it was cut short by rain, but hey!

I am now at Godawari, near Kathmandu, where I will be staying for the next 8 weeks. I will be teaching sculpture to girls who have been rescued from circuses in India, they were sold to the circuses by their families.

Teaching sculpture to Nepali girls who do not understand English and have no experience of Art. That is a challenge greater than the Char Dham, which now seems a distant dream. But I hope that my time here will give me time to reflect on that experience.

Back to India

1^st July Haridwar The Ganga Arti is the nightly ritual on the Har Ki Pari, the main bathing ghat on the river. It is an ancient ritual of bringing fire to the river at dusk, bringing light and warmth into the night. We had whitnessed this ceremony a couple of times when we were here in 2005 and it is strictly speaking something that you should do before embarking on the Char Dham. I think that we went with a mind to record it, in the hope of getting material for use in later work, but crammed on the ghat with many other pilgrims, cajoled by the attendants to give donations for the upkeep of the ghats one is caught up in the atmosphere of the thing. As the sun begins to sink the God of day is bought out from their temple, the amplified music starts to build and people raise their arms in the air, Jai, they shout. Then the sacred flames are bought down to the river bank and all the bells in all the temples in the town start to ring. For a few brief moments all is noise and light. Then the flame is bought amongst the crowds and people sale their banana leaf boats of flowers and flames down the river. I struggled to raise the video camera over the heads of those in front of me. I think I got some reasonable footage. Adrian has an easier time really, once the microphone is set up he can still look and listen. The sense of separation that the camera lens gives you is difficult to deal with sometimes. To always see mediated by the lens. Essentially I think the experience of being there is the most valuable material we gathered, this, like many rituals seems to get better every time that you see it. It is so theatrical, the building of tension, the attendants working the crowd, the anticipation. People travel from all over India for this ceremony and you are sucked in by their enthusiasm for it. Haridwar is a fascinating place, a mixture of spiritual and end of the peer and it seemed fitting that filming the Aarti I was using up a bit of tape from England that had Brighton Peer on it.