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| A R T M A T T E
R S Connected Centuries, Connected Continents By Sushma Joshi  Gea
Karhof has a twinkle in her blue eyes. “Its such a dark day,
isn’t it?” I say, shivering against the cold. “Yes,
but it is sunny inside,” she replies, beaming. This emotion
seems to encapsulate her artwork,which is lit with the warm light
of a world that is both ancient and modern, fantastic and realistic,
humorous and serious at the same time. Gea is here with friend Nan Mulder to exhibit at the Siddhartha Art Gallery—the exhibition is part of a four woman, three country show. The two have been friends since college nearly 40 years ago. For both of them, place is an important element in their artwork. Gea lives in Edam, a small town 20 kilometers out of Amsterdam, known for its cheese and cartography. Her husband, she explains with the sweetness of somebody who’s lived a good life, owns a chocolate factory. The couple own an old home that they’ve renovated. There is a well-known school of cartography in Edam, and the Emperor of Japan owns many of the maps that were created by this school. In Gea’s “Connected Centuries”, five neat houses stand as if they’re lined up in a narrow Dutch street. But there the resemblance ends—the tall houses are crowned by fantastic roofs, pagodas and stupas. Inside, Thai dancers sway as Superman descends with a girl in his arms, acrobatic girls build pyramids on top of each other, and Cambodian dancers fold their hands to Bette Boo. The central house shows a Japanese woman—the traditional kimono she wears, explains Gea, is 650 years old, and 650 years ago was when Edam became a city. A red figure rises up balloon-like behind—this is Geertje Dirkx, a Rembrandt’s model who originated from Edam, and around whose life Gea’s daughter has created a performance. “So Edam is the center of the world, rather like Jerusalem?” I joke, and Gea acknowledges that her hometown is central to her work. The pagodas and stupas that appear in her artwork were drawn in her studio in Edam before she decided to come to Nepal and see them for herself four years ago. Travel and different cultures is central to both artists’ art. Egypt was their first destination. “I started to make connections between the old and the new. I realized that time was nothing—there were artwork in Egypt that were four, five thousand years old,” Gea says. We tend to assume that modernity is linear, but this isn’t so, says Gea, who says the spectacular nature of ancient artwork stunned her with their precision and beauty. In a ‘View from Heaven,’ ancients and moderns share space as they look down from a circle in the ornately tiled sky. The people are winged, and of many nationalities. In the outer circle, dinorsaurs parade. “That’s the first life on earth. And if you look closely, you can see a prehistorical Mickey Mouse,” Gea smiles at her own visual joke. What appears to be a tiled background (or a map) is text from Dante’s Paradiso. “They are looking down, we are looking up—its double vision,” Gea says. Just as Gea’s work is shaped by place, so is Nan Mulder’s. Nan married an Englishman and moved to Scotland then Ireland; divorced him, then returned to Scotland with children. “Holland is a crowded country. I always wanted to move abroad—I’ve lived abroad for thirty years. I don’t belong anywhere, or else you can say I belong everywhere,” she says. Just as Gea exudes a sunny, blue and gold aura, so Nan seems to exude the whiff of mists and gloom of the British Isles. There is a gothic aura around her work, which is primarily black. That velvet black, she says, is what drew her to the technique. She works with mezzotints, which is a rare technique that few people still know how to make. Mezzotint is called ‘The black art’ in French, it’s an elaborate technique in which black dye is scraped to reveal the light. Nan works a lot with ideas of rooms—rooms that are inside oneself. “The whole world is my home. The one place where you are wherever you are is the room inside you. This is everywhere…or nowhere,” she laughs. Just as the grounded sense of being part of a small community defines Gea, so the sense of being an uprooted foreigner defines Nan. The elements of a person who doesn’t have a home keeps returning. “In Nepal and India, I am a foreigner. This gives me freedom, and separateness… it also makes me feel lonely,” she says. This combination of sentiments defines her art. “My doors have eyes. The outer world looks to the inside. The inner world looks outside.” A Japanese artist who combined techniques inspired Nan to use photo etchings and other techniques. This allowed her to make more prints in a shorter time. ‘Infinity in the palm of a hand’, her etching of a hand offering a marigold in an Indian temple, is classic in its simplicity. A bandh led them to their fortuitous meeting with Ragini Upadhay and Seema Shah. Unable to travel, the two decided to explore Kathmandu’s modern art world. The Nepali artists welcomed the two artists, and were very hospitable. This led to the idea of the joint exhibition of the four artists. “We all work with realism, even though its not pure realism,” Gea explains. The two artists took time off to give workshops of their techniques to students at Srijana Art College and Tribhuwan University. Gea hands me a tiny copper plate with her art embossed on it. Commissioned by the Post Office in Holland, the stamp features earth, water and sky. I see other interesting shapes in the background. “I discovered a new technique by accident,” she explains. “I printed a little string, and it gave a rouleffe, so I started to use it.” This invention is now in the hands of art students in Nepal. This spirit of exploration, it appears, passes on in the form of new mappings and techniques by artists who know no boundaries of place. Sushma Joshi is a writer and filmmaker. She can be contact at sushma@alumni.brown.edu. Siddhartha Art Gallery is at Babar Mahal Revisited; tel. 421.8048. |
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