2020. We enter the cave.
The world goes into lockdown
I mentioned last time how year after year I would find myself back looking at the paintings and ground plans of the Indian cave temples. It generally happened around December, sometime during the winter, and 2019/2020 was no exception.
I don’t remember any conscious decision to make a link between my interest in the caves and what was starting to happen around me at the beginning of the pandemic. The caves had been pulling me in, year after year. At the start of 2020 I was looking at the Ajanta paintings, honouring their strange splendour by playing with some of their motifs and forms.
I also started playing with images from my trip to Venice the previous year.
I had no intention of doing anything other than exploring ideas when I made this. Now I look at it and I see a woman enclosed within a building, shutters closed on the windows, looking away from a mysterious beast which is in there with her. She’s holding a shield though, protecting herself, with the bird of life inside the shield. The figure in the image below is also enclosed, though I don’t think at the time it was meant to reflect our incarceration.
I hugged trees in the grounds of the stately home near to my house, focussing on the lifeforce moving through the tree and my own aliveness.
We were all waiting. Figures from the Ajanta caves came and waited with me, watching a far off horizon that promised that one day there would be light again.
The animal/human/land/goddess themes began to interact in new ways, preparing the ground for the images that appeared in 2021.
Venice persisted, an Italian Madonna became the spirit of the angry earth, reprimanding us.
The dancers came by from time to time, reminding me of the wonder of still being alive.
And I fell in love with these two, cheeky souls speaking of life in prehistoric times.
Lastly, there’s this image of a form of mask, beautifully decorated, in the midst of a sea of cells and a dancing human life-form.
At the time, it was just where my curiosity led me. Now, these images seem to be full of unexpected resonances which were quite invisible then.
The feel of color and texture is so unique. Thank you for sharing. I need to come back and read it again.
That last one—the mask and the blood on the right, looming, daunting. All these were done, except the earlier year labeled ones, during the pandemic and you were stuck in Venice?