Wild life

On sandpainting, poetry, and those pesky Indian sculptures

Sandpainting at the Wild Life Exhibition

In Dancing Cells I talked about my fascination with biological forms and the energies of life, which I realised must have begun with the electron microscopy images shown to me by my biologist father. I wrote before that about my mysterious conversation with some lichen on a branch at the age of 19, and my later delight at discovering that China and India both had painting traditions which prioritised creating the feeling/breath of life, rather than striving for technically accurate representation.

Dancing cells tells how I was tricked by the cleverness of my art-starved soul into beginning to paint again (after twenty years of no art-making), and shows some of the results of the five year period that followed of playing with fractals and ink. At the end of this period, after a return trip to India, I decided that I should try to share some of what I’d been doing.

I approached a new festival that was starting in my town, The Stirling Fringe Festival, to see if there was a cafe wall somewhere that would allow me to share a couple of paintings. I was amazed when they offered me space for a whole exhibition, spread over two rooms, in a beautiful Victorian arcade.

I decided to call the show Wild Life. I didn’t want to just have paintings on the walls of a quiet gallery, so I made a soundtrack, put out paper and pastels for kids to play with, invited Rachel Amey to respond to the paintings by writing a poem which she then performed, and had poems by Jamie Reaser and Em Strang pasted onto the walls between what ended up being 55 paintings.

As well as the live poetry, I wanted to have something else that was alive and unpredictable, something that would embody the spirit of the unseen forces of living things. I came up with the idea of sandpainting. I had seen Tibetan monks in Dharamsala creating mandalas out of coloured sand. It was a long process that took many days, at the end of which the mandala was destroyed, swept up, leaving nothing behind, a commentary on the transience of life. After I had been to Kerala in the winter of 2012/2013, I found about a similar type of painting in a Hindu context (though this had a different ritual meaning).

Sand paintings in Tibet and Kerala, South India

I got a huge piece of white paper, bought some different colours of sand, and started to play.

For the show, the sand painting was unplanned, completely improvised, responding to the moment and the energies in the room. People would gather round, everyone watching and wondering what was going to happen next. At some point I would quietly take the edge of the paper and gave it a little shake… the sand shifted and the painting was gone. They gasped every time, always surprised.

I can’t remember if I planned the final bit, but it turned out that people were keen to try it themselves. It seemed to be very freeing for them, perhaps because they knew that they could just shake the paper and destroy anything that they didn’t like.

Sandpainting at Wild Life

After the show I carried on sandpainting for a number of months.

I did it as a performance in a shopping centre, I took it to a workshop. I hate performing but for some reason I was able to give myself over to the unpredictability of the flowing silica grains, as curious as anyone watching about what was going to happen next.

Sandpainting at a Discipline of Freedom workshop, 2013

I don’t know why I was able to do it as a performance. Perhaps because I too knew that I could destroy what I was making at any point, that nothing was committed or fixed, everything was in flux. I was truly playing, responding to what happened, on the paper, in the room, in my body – responsive feedback loops that somehow managed to remain uninterrupted by thoughts about results or external judgements.

There was no finished object, nothing to aim for. Just the traces of a process, of fleeting moments in time. I photographed them from different angles, I photographed the shapes slowly dissolving. The decay had as much beauty as the whole image - it was all beautiful to me. Like the fractal paintings, they weren’t an attempt by an artist to skilfully create an illusion of reality¹. They were actual, physical forms and processes, with me alive within them, moving in response to the physics and unpredictability of the emerging forms.

Strangely, a few months before the show, the figures that had first appeared in 2012 reappeared and started trying to insert themselves into the Wild Life forms.

They were clearly not going to go away. They must have been emboldened by the fact that I had now booked my second trip to India, just a year after the one that had given me the coloured fields of Wild Life. This time there was a plan.

I was going to return to Kochi, to see the murals of Mattancheri Palace. I was going to Sravanabelagola, Karnataka, to see Jain paintings, and I was going to see the Hoysala temples at Halebid and Belur. I was about to blow myself up with input, stimulus and delight, completely shattering the peaceful explorations of sand and paint fractals and my snaking line. But nothing could stop me following the pull back to all of this luscious aesthetic and philosophical richness.

1. My piece about Chinese landscape painting will tell you more about this idea….