Walking Into the Light

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.

As promised back dated posts Haridwar 01-07-08 I must say that this feels like old times, working on the laptop in a hotel room. This laptop has seen a few hotel rooms, a few as grubby as this one even. But then, as we were coming back from the ghats this morning we saw where the dobhi was being dried. I am sure it is really clean until it gets laid out on the side of the river right next to piles of rubbish, where pigs are scrabbling around in a welter of grubby plastic bags. Actually this computer has been in this very hotel before, when we stayed in Haridwar 3 years ago during our Silkthreads Project. It feels as if the project has started now, after lots of travelling we are here in one of the main centres of Hindu Pilgrimage. If you bath here all your sins are washed away, Adrian bathed his feet this morning, which might get rid of a few bad actions. Once again we are fascinated by how being a Hindu is not something reserved for going to the temple once a week, it is your whole being. We are also again fascinated by how the ritual and actions of religion are like performance. The images and symbols of the Hindu way act like metaphors, in the way artists try to make sense of their world through images and symbols. We have just begun to collect sounds and images, but tonight we hope to document the Ganga Arti, the Fire Ceremony on the Ganga, it happens every night at dusk, wild and wonderful. Look out for images soon. Tomorrow we leave for Yamunotri, the source of the Yamuna River, by private Ambassador Car. That actually means being a bit sick round the bends. For those of you reading this who had not been in an Ambassador, it is something like being in a boat. It is hard to know at this stage what we will become interested in, actions, rituals, bells. But it is great to be nearly there, experiencing the pilgrims way.

We are now in Kathmandu. Sorry that there has been a lack of BLOG, but we have not seen an internet cafe on the whole of our pilgrimage route.

What I will do is fill in the gap with installments as if we were on the pilgrimage, but not now. First, here in Kathmandu after 20 years, it is a great shock. Its so set up for tourists now, I knew it would have changed, but this is beyond belief. Thamel just goes on for ever, not just Freak street and the German Bakery now!

It comes as such a shock after spending about 2 weeks entirely with Hindu Pilgrims, we saw 3 white people the whole time we were on the pilgrimage, and we met a bunch of Pilgrims from Wembley! (We hope to meet up with them on our return to the UK. To find out their oppinions of the Pilgrimage route as British Asians will be very interesting)

The temples here are really interesting to see now that we have been imersed in Hinduism for weeks, this strange blend of Hindu and Buddhist, butter lamps and Ganesh, bells and stupas. It is fanscinating. Walked through to Durbar Square (the main square in K) last night, late afternoon. Many people were out shopping for vegatables, making puja (an act of worship) as they were passing. Darshan (giving a view of the resident god) was happening in one temple and below there was a mayhem of veg. and motorbike horns and shoe salesmen. It reminded me of when you are in a muslim country and the call to prayer comes and everyone just bumbles along ignoring it. Here Hinduism is just a part of everyday life. It is like making a performance piece on the way home from work, although of course it is a religious act.

One temple was surrounded by Pidgeons, this is my worst night mare seeing that I am affraid of birds, but Adrian made a great recording or thier sound.

We also fell upon a stupa, a copy of the Swayambunath Stupa (stupa is a a round mound topped with a sculpture, used in buddhist worship). I have never seen this before. Gee (clarified butter) was being thrown down its sides and again the surrounding mini stupas were a mix of Buddhas and Hindu Deities. However, the highlight was an impromptue game of cricket, Adrian was a bit of a hit with the ladies.

So more catch up news to come. For now, we have a HOLIDAY in Thamel