Peripatetic Painting: Pathways in Social, Immersive, and Empathic Art Practice: Travel, Transience and Cross-cultural Experience 9811640041, 9789811640049

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Michal Glikson

Peripatetic Painting Pathways in Social, Immersive, and Empathic Art Practice

Peripatetic Painting: Pathways in Social, Immersive, and Empathic Art Practice

Michal Glikson

Peripatetic Painting: Pathways in Social, Immersive, and Empathic Art Practice

Michal Glikson Australian National University Canberra, ACT, Australia

ISBN 978-981-16-4004-9 ISBN 978-981-16-4005-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4005-6 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

In 1996 I met Australian expatriate artist and painter Vali Myers. In her younger years Myers lived itinerantly in parts of Europe and had conducted her painting wherever she happened to be, and often in cafes. When I met Vali she was in her seventies and somewhat more settled but with her portable miniature practice, she embodied my idea of a peripatetic painter. Vali shared with me a Yiddish poem that she always carried with her. The poem came to capture something essential that I have felt about the process of working creatively with and through the uncertain, often exhilarating, and sometimes terrifying experiences brought through travel. Keep hidden from me. Keep from me all that I might comprehend. I ripen toward you in my unknowing.1

To me the poem reads like a prayer, expressing that sense of tension between the yearning to trust and terror of the unknown. It might have been written for a nomadic artist as it describes the human craving for certainty whilst acknowledging that the most fertile and creative ground is that of not-knowing. To be ‘peripatetic’ is to wander, move, or journey, with or without attitude or purpose, over the earth. It is the state of unfixedness rather than a particular shape or style of journey that defines the peripatetic. Peripatetic or nomadic art practice evokes the innate creativity of journeys that with their uncertainties and unknowings present possibilities, intensely different opportunities for response and making. While painting in Bengal I was told a story that I found useful early on during my research for this book in describing what I was experiencing with nomadic painting; A saddhu sat with his students beneath a tree. One asked, What is an artist? To which the saddhu replied, “Two birds perched in a tree. In Bengal it is our way to feed the birds in hope of pleasing the gods, and sure enough soon someone came and scattered seed. One bird said to his friend, “Come on!” and flew down to eat. But the second bird stayed up in the tree, looking on. In a while the first bird called again ‘Come and eat—there’s 1

Rachel H. Korn, Keep Hidden from Me, trans. Carolyn Kizer (Oakville, Ont.: Mosaic Press/Valley Editions, 1982). The full version of this poem can be found in the Appendix. v

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plenty!’. But the second bird still looked on. He looked on, and on, until all the seed had been eaten. Said the saddhu, ‘People are like these birds. Some like the first bird, are eaters. Others like the second bird, look on. The artist is both”. This book explores the journey of creating three scrolls between 2012 and 2015 through a series of increasingly immersive journeys in Australia, India, and Pakistan. The story of the two birds became a metaphor for my experience of these journeys that became about painting through life and its events. As empathic spaces of listening, drawing, and participation opened up, so did a sense of the capacity for painting to be a key into worlds, an tacit means of negotiating barriers of language and culture, in what I came to acknowledge as an often challenging and risky form of practice. Significantly as my journeys progressed, painting gathered significant dimensions such as of advocacy and agency, moving ideas of the artist beyond those defined in the story of the two birds.2 Expanding ideas of the visual diary and historical genres of travel painting has been about tapping into ancient modes for which wandering was a way of knowing. Connecting this with the archetypal paradigm of the storyteller, one who follows a calling, has been about naming significant influences that I found worked for me as an artist creatively negotiating personal unsettledness amidst the wish to confront and develop through ‘unknowing’. Canberra, Australia

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Michal Glikson

Safety relates here to the shift from studio to a more impermanent space. Safety in practice became associated with the ability to enter and negotiate uncontrolled conditions, and to sustain creativity within these.

Acknowledgements

With love and gratitude, Omair Raza, Daniele Dalia Viliunas, Laurraine Miller, Ruth Waller, Fehmida Raza, Andrew Glikson, Miryam Glikson-Simpson, Rod Simpson, Vida Brown, Judith Macdougall, Blipblab Das, Kate Gardiner, Anindita Bhattacharya, Karan Rao, Yogesh Mahida, Reshma Nair, Siddharth Tagore, Ross Gibson, Buku Larrynggay Mulka Art Center, Fatima Zahra Hussain, Salima Hashmi, Suroosh Irfani, Lekha Poda, Anupam Poda, Toto Lahiri, Poushali Das, Anuradha, Saurav, Ponomesh Das, Amit Mukhopadhyay, Khaleem Janjua, Nida Bangash, Anne Brennan, Pip Devis, Gary Kildea, Mark Bayly, Peter Maloney, Caroline Huff, Ellie Kent, Vanessa Barbay, Suzanne Moss, Mathew Morningstar, Tiffany Cole, Ella Whateley, David Broker, Stephen Holland, Damien Minton, Jennifer Taylor, Julie Brooke, Tuanhung Le, Naheed Fakhar, Rod Simpson, Brenda McAvoy, Denise Ferris, Barbara McConchie, Helen Ennis, Sanchyang Ghosh, Dilip Mitra, Second Year Miniature students at Kala Bhavan, Viswa Bharati University, Lady of Trolley, Mr Hungy, Maryam, Ling, Kaye Carter, Jenny Carter, Atul, Bina Rao, Sajjad Hamdani, Manubhai, Mampi Saha, Ranima Chitrakar, Seema Chitrakar, Soniya Chitrakar, Susuma Chitrakar, Rupa Chitrakar, Shyamsunder Chitrakar, Neelam Malhotra, Satya Sivaraman, Bulbuli, Keyla, Puja, Tulsi, the Team at Howrah Station, Mohanbhai, Ruma, Shampa Abhitas, Taufik, the Riaz family, Pobhitro, Sitakshi, Dhrupadi, Pobhitro, Mousumi, Rahima Begam, Zee Farrar, Farhan Rasool, Mohsin Shafi, Beenish Raza, Ali and his family, Neem Safi, Tahir Yazdani, Nasha Shah, Safia, Amanat, Hussein, Naina, Sultan, Imran, Abbas, Qasim, Hina, Irum Shafa, Babli, Kashish, Sarina, and the community under Modi Mill Flyover. In memory of Saurav, Nirmalendu, and Kim.

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Author’s Note

Completing writing for this book in 2021 during the event of a global pandemic that saw the movement of people severely curtailed, I found myself wondering about the art practice I have been developing over years and describe in this book. Focused as this practice has been with travel and movement across cultures, I had a disturbing sense of this dynamic way of making art as strangely and suddenly shifting in meaning such that that its ongoing life seemed uncertain and precarious. Desire to connect with the world beyond the studio had motivated me to redirect personal senses of rootlessness and to discover connections between the paradigms of the storyteller, the advocate, and the artist. But in light of the pandemic that constrained cross-border movement, I struggled to remain buoyant about my practice until I understood the circumstances as testing my commitment to peripatetic painting, and my belief in its relevance and value. A sense of responsibility to those whose stories fill the paintings that are the subject of this book ultimately provided motivation to continue and complete. Those stories and their protagonists had allowed me to develop as a person, and grow a capacity for empathy, enriching my practice with connective dimensions and deeper meaning. In this book, painting thus reveals itself to be as much a way of being with others in their worlds as a means of enunciation, and personal creative expression. This book also represents a wish to share processes of change concerning what was required for me to shift from the enclosed studio to ‘the studio of the world’. I have sought to open up the ways in which I became more responsive, flexible, aware, and available as an artist, painter, and human being, and the shape of my questions. How was it that painting ‘took off’ when I did—when I released ideas and assumptions, and accepted the gift that is transience and immediacy? Why does the practice examined come to involve the expanding of consciousness, to include multiple ways of seeing and being in the world? I like to think that the reflections in this book emphasise the creative possibilities of immersion, experiential and embodied processes, and the significance of being with others in real time, embedded in the often messy, awkward, and unpredictable

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field that characterises nomadic painting. Sharing these, my intention has been to offer through examples support to those who like me are seeking to reinvent their practice. Believing that the feet of the artist belong firmly in the world, we may provide stories, solutions, and attention to better greet, honour, and heal.

Note to the Reader

Organisation of Chapters This book follows the journey of making a series of scroll paintings that together form a work titled Australindopak Archive. Chapters are organised around the creation of each scroll painting as this took place in one or more countries and diverse contexts. Sections deal with particular paintings and the practical and technical ways in which these came about. As such this book is best read in accompaniment with the scroll painting in discussion. The Australindopak Archive has been fully digitised. Scrolls with their component audio works can be accessed and explored through an interactive platforms on the author’s website: michalglikson.com Opening the Archive takes the viewer to a page where they may select a scroll for viewing. Each scroll can be navigated using a control panel in the lower right-hand corner. Paintings can be magnified to allow for close viewing of detail. Identifiable hotspots in the form of bright green or purple outlines surrounding particular paintings can be turned off at the control panel for uninterrupted viewing of the paintings. When clicked, hotspots open and allow listening to associated audio works. Online chapters and sections in this book also contain online links to fieldgenerated documentary films. These are available for viewing by authorised users.

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The interactive platform showing hotspot linking to an audio composition embedded in Canberra and Other Ideas: Scroll I: Australindopak Archive.

Contents

1 Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forging an Identity Through Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Every Tribe Has Its Storytellers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The World of the Studio and the “Studio of the World” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Kashmir Experience: Painting and Volunteerism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Studio Begins to Disrupt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Out of the Studio, Into the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Format for Peripatetic Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Belonging to Peripatetic Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 2 2 4 5 9 10 12 14 14

2 Pakistan and Australia: The First Scroll: Canberra and Other Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Domain of Diarykeeping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Following the Drifting Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Walking on the Periphery: The Emergence of Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meetings on the Margins—The Secret Life of Mushrooms . . . . . . . . . . . . The Language of Collage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Being a Gleaner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Lexicon for Travel Painting: Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Sleeper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Juxtaposition and Its Meaningful Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Expressing Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Language in Company Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Language in Satire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meeting Mr Hungy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Way of Bowerbird . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Nobody Owns Anything Anymore”—To Use, or Not to Use? . . . . . . . . . Srilamanthula Chandramohan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Caravan of Ling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Possum of Liversidge Street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15 17 17 19 22 23 24 27 29 31 33 34 37 40 42 44 46 47 49

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The Merry Go Round in Civic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rabbits of Lake Burley Griffin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Woman Who Runs in All Weather . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Carpark at Kingston Wetlands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Man with the Bicycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Woman in a Corner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maryam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Our Lady of the Trolley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Planning for the Next Scroll: Influences and Guides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

50 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 62

3 Australia and India: The Second Scroll: Australind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Painting in Hunchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marbling in a Garage: Unorthodox Spaces of Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hunchy Holding Its Breath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Light into Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Portraying the ‘Imaginal World’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Insights into Planning and Packing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Hunchy to New Delhi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Touching the Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mediating Chaos: Drawing and Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Carved Door in Old Delhi: Traces of the Colonial Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meeting Atul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miniature Techniques and Nomadic Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Empathy, “The Gift of an Attentive Life” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intangible Products, Connection, and Empathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Big Indian Wedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bridging Realities and Bina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bulbuli’s Day: Storying the Extra/ordinary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kela . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Gardener of Gurgaon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yogi Dreams of a Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Navigating Culture: The Pot of Bad Luck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miniature and Life Drawing: Integrating Opposites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Invitation of the Artist: Painting in Public Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Evolving Role of Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Man with a Grin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Being ‘Out There’ and ‘In Repose’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Baroda to Bengal: Noticing Shifts from the Air . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Riaz Mohalla . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ghosts of Saint Paul’s Cathedral: Painting Phantasmagoria . . . . . . . . . . . . Shonali Alo: A Language of Phenomena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Advance Haircut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Boy Comes Singing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chai with Manubhai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

65 66 68 71 75 77 79 81 82 84 87 89 91 94 95 96 97 98 101 103 105 107 110 112 114 115 116 117 118 121 122 124 126 127

Contents

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Under Howrah Station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Story of Rahima Begam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Meeting Mousumi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rahima and Mousumi: Visually Bridging Distinct Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . Santiniketan: Painting as Witnessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Statue of Tagore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sitakshi and the Pink Skirt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The College Street Coffee House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Woman Washing Her Sari . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Temple of Titli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rupa’s Teashop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biplab, the Revolutionary Homeopath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Human . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . With Chitrakars in Naya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Culture, Immersion, and Food . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Performing Stories for Other Families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paintmaking in the Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shampa of Baidyabati . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Kashmiri Kowboy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Two Birds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dinner with Sanchayang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kolkata to Kanpur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sati Chaura—Massacre Ghat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Under Modi Mill Flyover: An Opportunity to Re-appraise Practice . . . . . Sarina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Self-portrayal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

129 131 135 138 139 142 144 147 148 150 151 152 156 157 158 160 163 168 172 174 175 176 177 181 183 185 186

4 India, Pakistan and Australia: The Third Scroll: IndoPak . . . . . . . . . . A New Scroll . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Babli of Main Market . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding Through Drawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Baba of the Graveyard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ralli Motif . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agency, Painting, and Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “He Acts Like He Owns the Street”: Multi-coloured Realities . . . . . . . . . . Pelican Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In Jilani Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My Landlord Yazdani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Puppi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Listening Space: Rafhan’s Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Delays, Dis/advantages and Diversion: Painting a Community in Mardan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Subzi Wallah Near Mardan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Language of Absences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

189 191 193 195 199 200 202 208 209 210 212 213 218 220 224 226

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Contents

My Neighbour Omair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dog in a Green Trenchcoat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Safia’s Sewing Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giving and Its Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tea with Hina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Chickens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Girl in the Rickshaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Remembering, Resistance, and Survival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No-Man’s Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cowgirls of Gurgaon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Art of Border Crossing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No Sense of an Ending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Post Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

227 229 230 233 234 236 238 240 241 243 244 247 249 250 251

Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

Chapter 1

Prologue

A ‘peripatetic’ is a traveller, a nomad who traditionally walked from place to place.1 The word arises from the Greek language in which it was used to describe a particular group of philosophers who liked to walk as they thought and talked out their ideas. Walking is innate to the state of being peripatetic or nomadic, which can evoke literal, spontaneous wandering, or journeys with planned itineraries and destinations in mind. As the Scottish journalist, nomad, tramper, and writer Stephen Graham suggested, “put no destination on your rucksack. You are not choosing what you shall see in the world, but are giving it an even chance to see you”. As a form, the nomadic art practice reflects life in that the journey unfolding, with its multitudinal points of arrival, is of focus. Nomadic art practice invokes the idea that itinerant or transient ways of life may be inherently creative through the way that journeys with their innate uncertainties, variations and opportunities stimulate or provoke response from the traveller. A core idea at work in this book is that art works formed out of such experiences have the capacity to testify to an experience of life that is integral to the truth surrounding the purpose of life itself.2 I was not always a peripatetic painter and the transition to becoming one was often challenging and cathartic. One of the reasons for this had to do with my own training as steeped in studio traditions of painting. Another was difficulties I had with locating peripatetic practices on which to model my own. Models of this kind of practice take such different shapes according to subject and orientations such that even those I observed at work in my own discipline, painting, could only offer vague guidelines. As I found, it was courses in applied anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking that taught me much about how to negotiate and take on the particular challenges of a social, immersive, and empathic practice with painting.

1 2

“Peripatetic,” in Collins English Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged (Farlex, 2014). Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping (London: Robert Holden & Co Ltd, 1927). 85.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Glikson, Peripatetic Painting: Pathways in Social, Immersive, and Empathic Art Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4005-6_1

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Forging an Identity Through Painting What draws an artist to work peripatetically? Why is it important to understand the impulses that motivate an artist to leave the familiar, to venture into unfamiliar cultural territory? I discovered in practice the importance of thinking about this as I grew to understand how my activities involved, impacted, and affected people, animals, and environments. Wherever I worked for example, people were curious and interested. They wanted to know where I was from and why I had come. Why had I left my home, why this particular place, why was I making pictures of certain things, or picking up particular items. What would I do with the pictures, and how long was I staying? Within the academic world, I was asked to provide theoretical underpinnings to my activities, to explain my motivations for travelling to particular places, and to defend my work intellectually, artistically, and also ethically. And finally, a large part of what was driving me to work in a peripatetic manner was deeply personal, and which involved senses of non-belonging. Growing up in Australia, my parents did not teach me any aspect of their language or culture. They had their reasons for this, but I remember always feeling bewildered, and with a sense of a missing link, or gap. As I examine my motivations with painting, with crossing cultures, and doing travel I sense layered histories playing out. These are the histories of Jewish people, migrants, Internationalist and Socialist movements, settler cultures, communist cultures, counter cultures and subcultures of seeking, and self-realisation. So many different sociocultural histories rather than just one history have been playing out through my art practice. In a psychological way I feel myself carrying my histories about, those ancestral lives governed by moving and by being moved on are moving me. They rise to the surface becoming palpable in moments when my father unfolds his family history for me, tracing his finger over a map of central Asia to the Caucasus and the shores of the Caspian Sea. Another time they surface as my mother refers to her grandmother’s village in former Czechoslovakia as annihilated, no longer existing in materiality except as a monument, and I have the same sense of fragmented, layered history. Invoking the peripatetic in me, it stirs archetypal figures of the wanderer, rebel, pilgrim, seeker, and healer.

Every Tribe Has Its Storytellers Thinking of transience as a space of creative possibilities and wanting to know the world through being with it, is about seeing that there is usefulness in thinking of oneself as part of the whole world rather than one culture or one country. Some of my understanding of these ideas and their ancient roots began in 1998 when I met Vida Brown, a senior artist of Yuin indigenous community in New South Wales in Australia. Yuin country includes Booderee National Park where I had driven in the summer of 1998 intending to camp and paint.

Every Tribe Has Its Storytellers

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Something about Booderee, perhaps the solitude of walking in proximity to the sea and its wildly beautiful cliffs and forested coastlines, of sleeping in a tiny tent facing the ocean, worked on me. I was using pastel, a medium that required no brush and which made painting feel primal, more like an extension of the body as through my fingers. The coloured dust settled in my skin and my food, and with this a sense of my body being permeated by colour. I surrendered to the peculiar experience of seeing unrecognisable shapes and forms emerge in my painting. Impulses arose. I had not thought about connecting with traditional owners of country, but in Booderee, a desire to connect with the Indigenous custodians emerged. I don’t know what I wanted—advice perhaps, and I think also permission of some kind. Out of the studio, on country, I was becoming aware of what it meant to connect with land more deeply through my painting. In many parts of Australia to connect with traditional owners is not always possible but in Booderee it was because the Yuin had regained rights to country through the Native Title act and because their community was nearby and accessible.3 I drove to the ranger station to ask about the whereabouts of the Yuin community. When I arrived, a Yuin version of Christmas was in full swing and I felt shy. I sat in my car for a long time before plucking up courage to knock on a door, where I found myself asking awkwardly, “Do any painters live here, and if so could I speak to one”. I found myself directed to the home of artist and Yuin elder, Vida Brown. Vida invited me in. I remember the vibrance of her batik paintings covering her walls. She was very kind and when I asked her if she might look at my painting, told me to lay it on the table while she made tea. I tell Vida about my sense of not-belonging in Australia, about the anxieties of being a non-indigenous artist traversing her land. I show her my painting with its motifs that I do not recognise or understand. Vida listens. She calls her husband and they examine the painting. They discuss it in their language, pointing to shapes. Some of the shapes, they tell me, represent their totem. Vida points out masses of circles and triangular forms. I made them but I see nothing but circles and triangles. This is Owl, she is saying, our totem. Suddenly I see owls, hundreds of them, with round eyes and triangular beaks. I begin apologising for the inadvertent appropriation, thinking this is a nightmare. But then Vida says “We don’t see it quite like that.” And then she tells me something her had mother told her, about people born to the tribe who felt called to travel beyond tribal borders. They would go, sometimes for a long time, to return with stories of the world. The precious knowledge and information they gathered meant that they were given special permissions to cross tribal borders and taboos. I told Vida I was “not Indigenous”, and she said, “It doesn’t matter. Every tribe has its storytellers. You might be one of them.”4

3

The Native Title Act 1993: A law passed by the Australian Parliament with the intention to provide a national system for the recognition and protection of native title and for its co-existence with the national land management system. 4 Michal Glikson, conversation with Vida Brown (Wreck Bay, 1998).

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I stayed in Vida’s community for several weeks. It struck me later on how Vida had focused on the creative dimensions to my painting activities in her country, and not anxieties about invasion and colonial history. Her sharing of the Yuin storytellers made me wonder if her approach was grounded in understandings of tribal history preceding colonisation. It was not ‘only a story’ but something that resonated, and it stuck with me. Much later I encountered in the writing of Wade Davis the idea of an ethnosphere, ‘humanities greatest legacy’. The ethnosphere is like a biodiverse realm woven of the myriad cultures of people and their thoughts, intuitions, beliefs and inspirations. With this perspective every language is like an “old-growth forest of the mind, a water- shed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities”. Storytellers in their navigations have the capacity to contribute to this forest through expanding the cultural vernacular of their tribe, and of those with whom they spend time. It makes sense that human communities all over the world have developed frameworks for facilitating and enabling the work of storytellers which represent beads on the string of our evolution.5 At the time I met Vida I had yet to learn about the ancient relationships that existed between Indigenous people of Australia, such as the Yolgnu of Arnhem Land and peoples of Maccassar and Sulawesi. Without knowing for certain whether people from Asia travelled as far south as Vida’s country, the idea that her community had evolved frameworks of understanding of the work of the storyteller intrigued me. A part of me was searching for models of storytelling beyond what I knew of it. I found the idea that cultural exchange might have been a part of life for Vida’s people fascinating. As a painter working through the complexity of my own cultural positioning her perspective was a gift, seeding for me the idea of the storyteller and of the artist as a purposeful peripatetic.

The World of the Studio and the “Studio of the World” The year that I began studying fine art at the Australian National University (ANU), there was introduced a combined degree program enabling cross-disciplinary studies. I chose politics and anthropology and brought the ideas I began to encounter in these areas into the studio. They rattled alongside what I was learning in the fine arts curriculum, pushing me to expression. Interdisciplinary study became a rich terrain of stimuli that importantly fed my curiosity about the world, my desire to experience it, and be with it through painting. In my second year of university an opportunity came to visit one of the countries I had been studying in the shape of a trip to India as a tourist. This was my first experience of a non-western culture and the trip connected me with some of the problematics of tourism. It was not long before I became disatisfied with the kind of experience that as a tourist I was expected to undertake, which was namely short stays in successive localities having what I felt to be superficial experiences of people and place. 5

Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2010). 2, 3.

The World of the Studio and the “Studio of the World”

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This trip was however significant in providing an experience of stepping out of studio practice. I took to the logic of the visual diary, which I diligently kept. But returning from India, the studio quickly resumed its habitual importance along with stretched canvas formats, and techniques of oil and acrylic paints. Away from the sights, sounds, smells and the immediacy of life on the streets of that oh-so-different country, those impulses to put down, draw, gather, and make entries in my visual journal faded. I liked looking at the journal in the way of a photograph album, but its content had become unreachable. My desire to keep the visual journal going in Australia dropped once I returned, as did my motivation to explore out of context what I had discovered and diarised whilst in India.

The Kashmir Experience: Painting and Volunteerism “It seems to us…that the vast, semi-secret wars we are witnessing must be urgently documented. Even so, we know that we are at the start of our fraught, long negotiation between the self-determined aims of the artist, the interests of a national institution, the coolness of the military and the expectations of several differing publics.”6 Australian painters Charles Green and Lyndell Brown describe their sense of their art practice as an activist tool through documentation and witnessing, armed with the ‘self-determined aims of the artist’. Though they were facilitated in an official and sanctioned capacity as war artists, this did not lessen the complexity accompanying their position amidst the aims, interests, and expectations of others, nor the power of the idea that through painting they could question and open up dialogue. Thinking about the complexity of situational and nomadic painting, this revealed for me through experiences of seeking to enter contexts in both sanctioned and unsanctioned ways through volunteerism. During volunteer activities, painting offered me a way of truth seeking, of being critical toward received narratives, and where taking myself into different cultural contexts as a painter was, like Green and Brown, about wanting to see for myself what was going on through an experiential and embodied process. In 2005 I was saving for a second trip to India. In October that year a devastating earthquake struck Kashmir, with its epicentre in Pakistan-occupied territory. I had experienced a lively few weeks stay with a Kashmiri family to whom I had been introduced whilst travelling in Indian-occupied Kashmir the previous year. Though I was studying, I was still largely ignorant about the history of India and Pakistan concerning Partition, and about the politics surrounding the continued occupation of Kashmir, and oppression of Kashmiri people. I also had little understanding about endemic problems to do with disaster management in these countries. When the 6

Charles Green and Lyndell Brown, “No Agency: Iraq and Afghanistan at War - the Perspective of Commissioned War Artists: The British Isles, the United States, and Australasia,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914, ed. Martin kerby, Margaret Baguley, and Janet McDonald (Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2019). 29.

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earthquake struck, I was taken aback by narratives of the disaster that portrayed Kashmiri people as irrational and violent.7 The nature of the reportage produced an overwhelming urge to ‘go there and see what was happening for myself’. Consequently I altered my plans to include overland travel from India to Pakistan, with the intention of volunteering in the field, and making paintings about the people affected by the earthquake. Getting to Kashmir was the beginning for me of seeing painting as an activist tool, and something that I imagined could happen alongside volunteerism. However my lack of understanding and experience of the international aid sector and its functioning, coupled with lack of connections in the field made for unsuccessful efforts to link up with a relief organisation in the months before leaving. Determined to go to the earthquake-affected area nevertheless, I used my air ticket and tourist visa to get to India, where I set about the process of obtaining a Pakistan visa. Obtaining this document at that particularly chaotic time, then travelling to the earthquake affected area, forming connections with aid organisations in Kashmir, and finally connecting with the people whose stories I wanted to hear, were things about which I have continued to reflect years later because of the incredible uncertainty governing processes with achieving these aims. I was following an inner impulse which on the outside appeared to impractical, and in the opinion of more than a few, quite crazy. Deciding to take this journey, many people including family and friends, advised me against travelling to Pakistan, and to the affected area. As it happened my experiences of people and their humanity on this particular journey were such as to bring me back to this part of the world time and again. I was no doubt fortunate with the guiding forces that came my way. But significantly, I learned that the dominant narratives about what one would encounter in Pakistan were incorrect. (For details of this experience see Field Notes: Kashmir in Appendix.) Below is an excerpt from a visual diary I kept whilst in Kashmir and which may help to give a sense of the spontaneous, often chaotic, and creative ways in which travel unfolded during that time and which stimulated developments with in-situ drawing and painting, and with skills of listening, and empathising. My endorsement in the field has been rejected by AusAid whose field manager described me as “a liability” and as an artist, “useless”. However I have been taken in by Islamic Relief and Kashmir Charity Trust, two NGOs working in Bagh, Muzafarabad, and outlying areas. They think I can be useful by spending time with people through sketching, and to this end I have been going with their teams on field trips to nearby villages to distribute all kinds of things, from roofing materials to shower kits. Truckloads of aid arrive each week, and you never know what will come. I gave out stacks of blue and red gloves last week to children. This week it is boxes of dates and technicolour woolly scarves. KCT has their office in the home of Uncle Taufiq, a twinkling-eyed elderly man whose house is one of the ones still standing. We volunteers sleep in a large tent in the garden. I have to pinch myself all the time. I can hardly believe I am here. 7

See Field notes from Kashmir: Painting through volunteerism concerning my experience in Indian Kashmir and Srinagar with Sadiq’s family, in Appendix.

The Kashmir Experience: Painting and Volunteerism

7

We visit the hills to distribute roofing materials and I see the houses all fallen down. People are piling their old wooden walls and stones to wait for rebuilding. I learn that one of the reasons many people died was because the safest place to stand in a house during an earthquake – the reinforced threshold of a doorway – is not a building regulation here. In my journal I make drawings of doorways, elaborately decorated. Families camp near their piled houses in UN issue tents. During breaks I sit and draw portraits of whoever is near. I’ve discovered people enjoy this, women and girls especially, who hold their portrait up, like a mirror. Today I sketched a long line of sisters, aunties, mothers, grandmothers, daughters and babies. I was worn out by the end, but thrilled for each portrait brings a smile, a blush, a fit of giggles. Laughter rings out, the disaster fades a little. Drawing, I sense people appraising me. Who am I? What is the quality of my attention? Do I really care? The opinions of my field manager and Ackbar the social worker are that the time I spend with people drawing says that I do care. It matters, they say, because people feel that most of the foreign journalists who arrived soon after the earthquake behaved like thieves, taking photographs and filming without permission, leaving without discussion. This I was told has made people angry and suspicious, and yet they need the other foreigners who bring aid, and so, Akbar says, they need to learn to trust again. I do my best, hoping that each day I do more good than harm as I don’t know the customs, the ways, or the words. MG. Kashmir diary. 2006.

Iman and Amreen. Watercolour, paper, ink. 10 cm × 12 cm (each). 2006. From Kashmir 2006

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I found many people in Kashmir spoke what was affectionately called ‘tootifrooti’ english. This allowed for simple communications to which I added gestures, and sketches of particular concepts. The notes I created during these interactions read more like mindmaps than the reports that my manager had requested, but the information they offered about people and their condition proved useful and was welcomed by my field manager. For me, drawing in this context was less about documentation and data-gathering than it was about listening. Sometimes when I showed people the drawings I had made of them or of their children the effect was like touching a hand. There was something profound about using drawing in this way which I came to understand more deeply and later in context of learning about empathy and ‘leaning’ (see Meeting Atul, Chapter Three, The Listening Space: Rafhan’s Story, Chapter Four, and in stories from The ralli motif , Chapter Four).8 Field drawing was affording me a way of being with and gettting to know people whose culture and language were new to me. In relatively short spaces of time I found myself establishing rapport with many, showing me the possibilities of in situ drawing for forging connection across cultural and linguistic barriers. Some weeks into my volunteer experience I bumped into the field manager from Ausaid, the official disaster relief organisation for Australia. Early on Islamic Relief had requested AusAid’s assistance with my endorsement (all foreigners required this) however AusAid’s field manager had declined on the grounds that in his view an artist could not make such contribution as would warrant taking responsibility, whereby subsequently Islamic Relief endorsed me themselves. I asked how the work was going and the manager mentioned difficulties with distributing aid, such as hygiene kits in the mountain villages. The problem was cultural, as his team was mostly non-Urdu or Kashmiri speaking foreign males, who traditionally would not be permitted to spend time with the Kashmiri women, and who lacked sufficient language with which to explain their aims. “We’re not able to give the kits out, let alone show how to use them” he admitted.9 I reflected on this, and on the ways in which I might have been able to assist in terms of spending time with the women, explaining the purpose and usefulness of the kits, had that organisation been more interested to understand the possibilities of the work I was doing as an artist regarding capacities for communication across social, cultural, and linguistic divides. In Kashmir I gained insights into the riots that had set off my initial curiosity and impulse to travel through conversations with Kashmiris, some of whom were members of the freedom movement. As they told me, on the day of the earthquake the Pakistan army, having rapidly assessed the situation and imminent collapse of governmental authority, became concerned with the ensuing vacuum of authority which they believed might advantage the freedom movement. Instead of assisting rescue operations or allowing Kashmiri people to conduct rescue operations, the army had focused on preventing movement by implementing immediate curfews and controls. So tight were these restrictions that people of the affected areas were unable to conduct in rescues, though they could hear the cries of those trapped in the 8 9

Dhaba: small restaurant; Ronald J. Pelias, “Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relations,” (2011): 9. Michal Glikson. Visual journal. Conversation with AusAid Field manager, Bagh. Pakistan 2005.

The Kashmir Experience: Painting and Volunteerism

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rubble. As one man said to me, “We could hear the calling [for help] but the Army pushed us back, they shot at us, they stopped us from helping our families and so we went mad – we rioted.”10 My experiences in Kashmir have continued to percolate, stimulating further thinking about about the meaning of volunteering, and about the capacity for drawing as a way of seeing and of being with others. The paradigm of the volunteer continued expanding in meaning for me from this point, although not in a linear way, during subsequent journeys. Importantly in Kashmir I had been offered a firsthand experience of this paradigm and how it could link into that of the artist. In this way ideas of service through connective art practice and immersive painting were seeded and began to grow, offering the direction that as a studio painter I had craved.

The Studio Begins to Disrupt When I left Kashmir, I travelled directly back across the Indo-Pakistan border to catch my flight back to Australia from Mumbhai. I might have flown out of Lahore but I wanted to travel through the city of Baroda on the way in order to visit the Maharaja Sayajirao University and its famous fine arts faculty, which is also known as the ‘Baroda School’. I was somewhat drained by my experiences in Kashmir, and so I found the studios, alive with impassioned students, invigorating and its warm and creative ambience was like a balm. When the Dean offered me a study exchange I took it gratefully, deferring my studies in Australia. I fully intended using the time to explore the work I had made in Kashmir—a body of one hundred drawings and portraits of children, women, and men. But somehow despite my efforts, I found it difficult to focus. I laid out the little works on the floor of the studio space they gave me, thinking to translate these into the kinds of large scale paintings that I was accustomed to thinking of as resolved works. But I found I kept slipping into those pictures and the memories they represented of that recent past. I put the works aside and told myself I would revisit them in Australia. I used the time to look at the work being made around me, exhibitions going on in the city, and talk to the many artists who would visit the school. One of these artists was Nilima Sheikh, whose studio I also visited. I was drawn to her lyrical style and refined technique, but I was especially impressed at the way she had translated these into large scale works on canvas - ‘real paintings’. Some months later I returned to Australia and the School of Art in Canberra, where I showed the Kashmir works to my teachers. I also invited my Anthropology lecturer to view the paintings and his comments on their ‘ethnographic’ qualities added new and encouraging dimensions to these works. Studying visual anthropology as part 10

This information was shared with me through unrecorded conversations. Although an unsubstantiated account it correlates with reports of the role of the military and its response during the earthquake that reveal focus on control of people. For details see Kashmir: Field notes in Appendix and an example of a report extract from “Pakistan: The Role of the Military in the Pakistan Earthquake,” in Pakistan (https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/: The New Humanitarian, 2006).

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of the combined degree, the course’ emphasis on film had overlooked the nature of earlier ethnographic studies, which of course had utilised drawing and painting. I think that it was at this point that my notions of ‘serious painting’ as a studio activity began to be seriously disrupted. However by now I was engaged in the Honours year, for which I had proposed to develop themes in the Kashmir works. I did not sense that with all I had been doing, that these were asking me to stop, to rethink my practice. Because I did not do this however, the process of producing paintings that year felt like pulling teeth. Even the pleasure of working again in larger scales with acrylic and oil did not help me to translate the Kashmir experience, at least not to the depth I wished, nor realise the kinds of paintings that I envisioned. It did not click for me that the work I had made in the field was the real work, and that a studio-based way of working might no longer be assisting my development. At the end of the Honours year I sat back and pondered the trouble I had been having with painting. I was still not ready to accept that large scale works utilising canvas and oil might not be right for me rather I decided that change of environment was the key. I felt drawn to return to India and to the life of the Baroda School. I had managed to make just enough money from my graduation exhibitions to finance Masters study at Baroda. Still, and despite my meaningful experiences across cultures, struggles with studio painting, and significantly, that studio space and materials such as canvas and oil had now in Australia become unaffordable for me, I remained fixated with the studio as an accoutrement, the symbol of ‘a real painter’.11

Out of the Studio, Into the World I arrived at the Baroda school in June 2008 lugging a twenty kilos suitcase bulging with the paraphernalia of my studio practice. Sometime in the first week one of my teachers dropped a copy of The Re-Enchantment of Art by Suzi Gablik, in my lap. Containing all the punch of a manifesto, the book precipitated the crisis of meaning about painting that had been brewing for me. Though more than twenty-years old, Gablik’s arguments made a clear and compelling case for a connective aesthetics of art practice, emphasising social responsibility and environmental sustainability. Deploring nineteenth century models of ‘ivory tower’ art practice, and the way in which Modernism had redefined art as the hedonistic disconnected production of objects, Gablik urges artists to ‘emerge from the studio and into the world’. Her idea of art as a way to change the world, and her arguments that the artists real work is

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Exploring the studio as a fixture of painting, the reader may wish to look to painting and historical culture, including western architecture. My personal preoccupation with the studio sprang from a combination of education, enculturation, ideas of the haven, as well as respect for and being influenced by the work of other/prominent studio painters.

Out of the Studio, Into the World

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responding to issues and concerns on the ground contradicted what I was accustomed to hearing about painting, and shook my world.12 Those first months became challenging as I took on Gablik’s ideas that brought about an epiphany for me. Her words reconnected me with experiences in Kashmir that had shown me the potential of drawing for connecting with people. These experiences, powerful in their reciprocity had spoken to my deep yearning for connection, and deeper still, though I was not aware of it, the wish to feel belonging. Gablik’s ideas also terrified me in that they pointed to the need for serious reassessment of my practice. When I did so, I found this wanting. The ‘studio way’—or rather the way that I used the studio, polarised with Gablik’s ideas of art practice answerable to the needs of our time. I found myself in a state of paralysis. I cancelled the order I had made for canvasses. I boxed up the oils I had brought all the way from Australia. But the problem was, what to do instead? I had been completely unprepared for this catharsis, which now seemed to render my relocation to Baroda senseless. Like a rudderless boat I floated in my studio for weeks, depressed, and lost as to what to do. When I described my predicament to teachers, the suggestion that I take time out and go walking was the one that I found the most helpful. Such advice was easy to take, for I found the towns and cities, even industrial urban centres such as Baroda exciting with their streets typically bustling with life, and the ancient centripetal layouts of their older districts that invited exploration. Free to wander and become enveloped in the life of Baroda’s urban spaces, I began to encounter things that left impressions on me. I began carrying a sketchbook again, in which I would make drawings on the street. Floating architectures in the form of the street stalls or laris populated every tract of road so that every few paces it seemed there was a new place or space to sit and take in the life. Walking this way on a daily basis, my sketchbook slowly filled with drawings of the people and the life. When it was full, then the studio suggested itself as a logical place to which to return to explore these. I played with mediums such as coloured pencils, felt tip pens, pastels, crayons, and watercolour. As materials these did not fulfill in the way that oil painting had, but I was grateful to be again investigating the world through the lens of picture-making. Immersion in the life of places, and walking, were offering a way to negotiate my ‘predicament with painting’. I missed the feeling of oil painting and especially the sense of technical achievement that comes of creating luminous and striking visual effects and illusions. I also felt confused and isolated by the contrast between my reshaping practice and the practices of most of my fellow students. The miniature tradition, traditionally a strong influence at the School, had been replaced with preoccupations with creating works of sensational scale and proportion. This trend that emerged during the phenomenal Indian art boom had become influential as it had seen a number of graduates launched into the international art scene where they gained acclaim, and significant financial rewards for their work. Searching for a model of practice, I became fascinated with the approach of my friend Anindita Bhattacharya, who was researching miniature painting. It was not just the aesthetic beauty and meaning that I saw in the details of her paintings, and 12

Suzi Gablik, The Re-Enchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991). 4, 5, 7.

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1 Prologue

which suggested to me possible alternative formats to large scale oil paintings, but the way that I observed her sitting in her space contentedly for hours, absorbed in creating her tiny two-dimensional worlds. She was so calm and so quiet that it was some months before I looked into her space and noticed what she was actually doing. This sense of an inner life and meditative way with painting, coupled with the techniques she employed suggested a way in which I could be mediating my sketchbook drawings. As well with miniature, I sensed possibilities for a portable practice that would allow me to walk, travel, carry materials, and make paintings outside the studio. As a mode this also suggested easing processes of transporting work back to Australia, and further afield in a way more financially sustainable.

A Format for Peripatetic Painting Studying in India and in Pakistan, my experience was characterised by introductions to their rich cultural, spiritual, and artistic traditions, influences to which I found myself opening over time. At the Baroda School the field based program of study allowed students to explore their choice from a dazzlingly rich terrain of Indian art traditions. I would have found this a difficult choice indeed had not Anindita’s practice inspired me to study miniature painting. I thought to pursue this where she had, in Kishangarh, a well known centre of miniature painting in Rajasthan. However looking at miniature styles of painting in books, my interest was sparked by the older Mughal and Persian styles with their exquisite Islamic-inspired detail, from which the Rajasthani stream had emerged and diverged. This led me think of study miniature in Pakistan but as this was expensive, and I was on a tight budget, I applied instead to the artist residency program at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. This would allow me to audit classes in their famous specialised miniature department whilst sharing my walking-sketching practice with students. Just before I left for Lahore, the Baroda School held an exhibition of Patachitra scrolls from West Bengal. As I drew near the artists who sat comfortably on the floor of the courtyard, I saw the scrolls they had carried with them on the three-days train journey from Kolkata. I had yet to understand the performative dimensions of this art form and found my attention taken with the aesthetic of the scrolls, which when I handled them felt light, compact, and strong. In the miniature department at NCA I observed a strong emphasis on technique. Technical skills were achieved through practical exercises involving the reproduction of aspects of ancient Persian and Mughal miniatures. These styles were deemed the epitome of the genre and their preoccupation in Pakistan was my practical introduction to the politics of miniature. Virginia Whiles’ research of contemporary Pakistani miniature increased my understanding of its evolution since Partition and which I learned was something that had been subject to the political dialogues ongoing in a nation plagued with anxieties of identity. In contrast to what I had thought, ideas of

A Format for Peripatetic Painting

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‘perfection’ in miniature painting, at least in Pakistan, have not been so much about interpretations of the spiritual, but about forging an identity for a nation.13 Miniature study involved working on sheets of wasli, a fine-textured paper made of layers, however wanting to continue the walking practice I had been doing in Baroda, I found myself exploring techniques I was learning with the drawings I was making in my sketchbook. This utilitarian format jarred however with the ideas of miniature I was encountering and which emphasised elite associations with court painting of Persia and Mughal India. I had not forgot the scrolls I had seen of the Patuyas, but I was slow to perceive their usefulness as a format because the bold Kalighat-style of the Patuya paintings contrasted greatly with the finesse and delicacy of miniature.14 The more I thought about the scroll however, the more this suggested itself as an alternative to the sketchbook. The scroll was likewise portable and practical. But I was also drawn to its resonances as an ancient system of archiving knowledge, particularly the way that scrolls often surfaced in myths and legends. It was this quality that convinced me of its potential as a miniature format. Over the years and working with scrolls I have become aware of additional psychological and spiritual aspects to the scroll that attracted me in subconscious ways, such as its connections with the Jewish Torah, its traditional uses in pilgrimage, and significantly, that scrolls as objects are able to be quickly packed up and carried away or hidden.15 The miniature department at NCA had its own workshop in which wasli was made and I approached the technician to ask if he could make me a scroll. He produced a beautiful triple layer wasli three meters in length, which cost a small fortune. I soon realized that at the scale I was working the scroll would take months to fill but as an experiment this allowed me to discover in practice how the format responded to travel and to miniature painting. I took this scroll back to Baroda where I worked in it for the next nine months exploring the techniques I had picked up in Lahore. I was hesitant however to bring the scroll into my walking practice and to work in it directly on the street through fear of exposing the paper to dirt and marking. Keeping paintings pristine and unmarked formed part of the canon I had seen modelled at NCA and wanting to keep to this, I tended therefore to keep the scroll in the studio where I would draw from memory or from photographs/videos things encountered on my walks, erasing the pencil traces as I had seen other Miniature students doing. During my second study visit to Lahore I had another scroll made, this one in double wasli and only two meters long. This scroll was lighter, more manageable, and less costly. With this scroll I felt able to experiment and to take some risks, and so I began a more exploratory kind of walking and drawing practice in which I carried the scroll, drawing into it in-situ. It was the beginning of a way with painting that felt a more logical integration of the two very different ways in which I had 13

Virginia Whiles, Art and Polemic in Pakistan: Cultural Politics and Tradition in Contemporary Miniature Painting (London; New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2010). 184–90. 14 Kalighat is a popular cartoon-like style of painting that utilises bold shapes, bright colours, and black outlines. It developed at the temples of Kali in Kolkata through the souvenir trade. It is thought that the Patachitra artists of West Bengal have been utilising this style for their scroll paintings since Patuya Sangit beginnings, some nine hundred years ago. 15 Scrolls feature in many peripatetic and also healing traditions of which examples for me have been the scrolls contained in the prayer wheels spun by a Buddhist pilgrims as they walk, and Ethiopian traditions of medicine in which scrolls function as the repositories of healing spells.

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been working—being out in the world and responding to it through the immediacy of drawing, and stepping back from such experiences to consider and mediate them through miniature painting.

Belonging to Peripatetic Practice When I completed studies in Baroda I watched as my classmates moved back to their homes, or settled in Baroda, or Delhi or Mumbai. I wondered where to go. The way of working that had developed for me seemed promising but I felt that I was following hunches rather than confident, grounded ideas. I needed more time to develop theoretical underpinnings, and more practical exploration afield to gather the meanings and implications of this practice. Somewhere within a sustained experience of moving and making lay the relationships, connections, incidents and encounters required in order to fill out and build my understanding of this way and its possibilities. Throughout my undergraduate study I had struggled with writing due to a learning disability and as such postgraduate research had seemed beyond my reach and ability. But in 2012 the Australian National University (ANU) introduced its practice-led PhD research program that reoriented the thesis as a supporting document for art works. The shift in emphasis on the kind of writing required, as well as the quantity (the practice-led thesis is 30,000 words whereas academic theses are 80,000) allowed me to think that I might be able to ground the convictions and questions generated by my experiences in India through practice-led research with peripatetic painting. I was fortunate in that whilst formulating my PhD proposal a public gallery in Canberra offered to show one of the scrolls I had created in India and Pakistan as this allowed potential supervisors from the ANU to gain a sense of the practice I wanted to explore. Sale of that scroll also enabled me to buy a ticket back to Pakistan, and a camera. I was proposing to examine the form and function of peripatetic painting which meant that if accepted, I would need skills with self-documenting my practice. I had been in Pakistan for five months involved in this when I learned that my proposal had been accepted.

References Green, Charles, and Lyndell Brown. 2019. No agency: Iraq and Afghanistan at war—The perspective of commissioned war artists: The British Isles, the United States, and Australasia. In The Palgrave handbook of artistic and cultural responses to war since 1914, Chap. 2, ed. Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley, and Janet McDonald, 23–43. Switzerland: Springer Nature. Gablik, Suzi. 1991. The re-enchantment of art. New York: Thames and Hudson. Pakistan: The Role of the Military in the Pakistan Earthquake. In Pakistan. https://www.thenewhum anitarian.org/: The New Humanitarian, 2006. Pelias, Ronald J. 2011. Leaning: A poetics of personal relations. [In English]. Whiles, Virginia. 2010. Art and polemic in Pakistan: Cultural politics and tradition in contemporary miniature painting [in English]. London; New York: Tauris Academic Studies.

Chapter 2

Pakistan and Australia: The First Scroll: Canberra and Other Ideas

In January 2012 I travelled to Canberra having arrived recently from Lahore, to begin research for the project that would see me developing the work I had been doing with painting in India and Pakistan. In this chapter I describe beginning practiceled research and stages of working on a new scroll painting. The focus here is the multiplicity of factors that served to impact me emotionally, psychologically, and practically to reshape my way of looking, my orientations, and my art practice. Discussions delve and open up the layers of an artistic process of responding to a city, and one with which I had history. As the first of the three scroll paintings dealt with in this book, the scroll Canberra and Other Ideas is an opportunity to examine what happened for me as an artist, and what happened for painting in context of particular and significant shifts in environment, conditions, and culture.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Glikson, Peripatetic Painting: Pathways in Social, Immersive, and Empathic Art Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4005-6_2

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Map of Lake Burley Griffin and Civic Centre. Green line indicates paths I took around the lake

Canberra was the city where I was born and grew up. Since graduating from university I had been away for some years and in the time that had passed the city had developed and changed. Though in some ways it remained familiar, in others it had become an unknown quantity and new terrain. Simultaneous senses of familiarity and strangeness thus distinguished my experience as I set out to translate a lived experience of this singular city through painting. Culture shock, that set of sensations tending to frame experiences of shift or change, impacted me. Canberra, a comparatively immaculate city not yet one hundred years old could not have been more different to the megacity of Lahore with its thousand years old heart, dense, polyglot population, intense pollution, and its highways lined with the wandering and the destitute.1 It had been some years since I had had a working space to myself and in Canberra suddenly I had a studio again. The studio was in a historic building that had been a prison hospital, and then a student boarding house, before being handed to the 1

I delve culture shock more deeply in context of painting in India and The Pot of Bad Luck, Chap. 2.

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art school. The building had a tendency to discharge its energy at night through strange noises that could be unsettling. I tried to settle in by cleaning, putting up visual material, and arranging my paint and brushes. But as I unrolled a length of paper on the table, I felt lost as to how to begin painting in this new place.

The Domain of Diarykeeping Though I had been exploring painting as a way of mediating my experiences across cultures for some time I did not perceive myself as a diary keeper because the paintings I made were things that I ultimately wished to share with others. The idea to use the scroll as a kind of diary offered freedom, alleviating pressures to create work that made sense to others, along with the need to conform to narrative prescriptions. As a diary keeper I could make and break my own rules, which included honoring the impulse and emotion of an entry, and returning to craft and refine it. Thinking of the scroll as a diary freed me in further ways, such as by providing a space in which I could conduct technical experimentation with painting, even as it became a repository of my innermost thoughts.2 My first impulse with the scroll was to do something that diary keepers often do which is to claim or personalise their diary through markings. My way of doing this involved splashing the length of the scroll with watercolour. When dry the markings disrupted the blank white paper with a string of colourful cloud-like forms that also conveniently suggested the placement of paintings. Another impulse I followed involved directing the flow of the painting from right to left, which is the direction in which the Hindu and Urdu scripts flow. This allowed for expressing my sense of being ‘between’ cultures, and of working from a space that sometimes felt more east than west.

Following the Drifting Mind In Canberra, in the quiet studio with the empty scroll I kept falling into reveries and memories of the recent past and of Lahore. A woman with hair streaked orange by the sun sat on a blanket at the edge of the road. For a month I walked passed this woman and looked at her every day as she, wrapped in a shawl with five small children playing round her, looked at me. One day I plucked up the courage to stop and say hello. ‘Hello’ was all I said as that was pretty much all the language I had at the time. She patted the blanket beside her and I sat. I had no Punjabi, and she spoke no English, but it didn’t seem to matter, as we simply clicked, and from then on were friends.

2

Philippe Lejeune, On Diary (Honolulu, HI, USA: University of Hawaii Press, 2009). 47, 58.

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I had a hard drive containing footage filmed in Pakistan. I was sitting in the studio watching scenes of Safia with her family. One of these showed Safia with her husband on a wintry morning, limned by the golden light of dawn, dismantling their tent home, an activity which the city council forced them to do daily. I found myself playing this over and over, finding in the film a touchstone, and then pathway into making paintings forged of memories.

Jhumpiri coming down. 2011. Still from field documentary. 2011

The online version of this chapter contains the field documentary Jhumpiri coming down available to authorised users. (Link).

Safia and me. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

Walking on the Periphery: The Emergence of Themes

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Walking on the Periphery: The Emergence of Themes In Canberra my practice changed in many ways that were both physical and psychological. For one thing, during my recent time in Lahore in Pakistan I had become used to working in the place where I lived, and thus to painting at odd hours and around the clock. Whilst grateful for the studio, as an institutional space this placed constraints in the form of designated hours of access, and in the way that painting and ordinary living became somewhat separated.3 Adapting to these new conditions, my practice became ‘semi-peripatetic’. The studio became the place to which I returned with the scroll to develop material gathered outside but it was not a home. This had the effect of intensifying my feeling of between-ness and the result was a sense of restlessness. I took this sense out walking, at first not taking the scroll, however in time the feeling to do so emerged. In this way walking became the key method by which I came by the stories I painted about in Canberra. Walking has been written about extensively as it forms a key method in many peripatetic practices. Walking encourages the artist to venture into the world, at their own pace without plan or destination. With its functionality disrupted, this way of navigating urban spaces provides a mode for conducting mythogeography, an offshoot of cultural geography that investigates the life of urban spaces in light of their human associations, nuances, and histories. As sociologist Steve Pile suggests, a city is not a city but a mythogeological collection of invisible ‘phantasmagorias’—tangibly textured atmospheres, rumours, unrealised developments, glimpses, ghosts, traces and nostalgia. Through walking, I gathered material about spaces and their inhabitants. For me, wandering and mythogeography were about perceiving for myself such nuances of place as described by Pile, furnishing material for paintings.4 Walking had initially come into my art practice when as an undergraduate student I began travelling in India. I found the streets typically bustled with life and the labyrinthine layouts of older cities and towns invited wandering. I would frequently become lost which as an activity I developed a love of, because the processes of finding my way back became ones of revelation and discovery. Walking had the effect of enveloping me in the life of the spaces, bringing me into encounters with things that often left deep impressions. Walking was a potentially transformative practice involving “repeated and deeply imbricated border crossings” arriving through traversals of “neighbourhoods, traffic flows, ethnic enclaves, residential and commercial zones, subcultures, historical sites, sacred spaces and outcroppings of the wild in parks, cemeteries and abandoned lots.”5 3

Mallgrave, Harry F. “Embodiment and Enculturation: The Future of Architectural Design.” Frontiers in psychology 6 (2015): 1398. 1. 4 Heddon et al., Walking, Writing and Performance: Autobiographical Texts, 84–86; Ibid., 83; Steve Pile, Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd, 2005), 19. 83. 5 Macauley, F. “Walking the Urban Environment: Pedestrian Practices and Peripatetic Politics”. 193.

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Walking in Baroda and later on in the cities and towns of Gujarat, Punjab, other northern Indian states, and further afield in Pakistan was how I became more aware of and interested in the design and flow of subcontinental urban spaces, particularly those created before the advent of motorised transport. Over the years as I visited different places, I became acquainted with the style of the old parts of cities which were structurally similar. The older parts of towns and cities all contained bazaars, often very old and in some cases ancient. I would spend hours in these bazaars which were full of character and ambience, combing their winding and circuitous pathways. Their spaces were pocketed with vibrantly social areas in which I found all life seemed to be taking place. Navigating the enclaves I would stumble upon places in which people were conducting devotions, niches in which ceremonies or festivities were taking place, culd-e-sacs containing tiny manufacturing workshops and factories in which hammering and other sounds suggested cottage industries, and other kinds of spaces in which activities spoke of the economic and cultural life of communities, and which were of interest to me. There were many places to sit and rest, and where importantly it felt comfortable and permissable to look on and observe goings on. In older areas there were also often ancient, large, charismatic trees. Sometimes these trees were places of worship, for they would be festooned with devotions and offerings. Other times the trees may have been kept simply with the idea of sheltering humans, but they also sheltered birds and small animals, and in this way they imbued the built terrain with colour, shape, scent, and significantly, cooler temperatures. I observed how the trees created microclimatic conditions by retaining and releasing moisture—even in Baroda on the hottest days when the air blowing in from the deserts of Gujarat fairly crackled with dryness, the canopy provided by trees and creeping vines in the narrow streets of its old city made those spaces habitable, atmospheric, and immensely pleasurable to walk in. 6 Wherever I walked, as a mode getting about in this way offered visceral and embodied sets of experiences allowing for discoveries of place and culture. But as a painter walking itself, especially extended periods of walking, encouraged me to slow down mentally. Hours of exhaustive walking I found had the capacity to palpably alter my relationship to time and space, allowing me to touch a mindset that methodologically aligned with miniature, and which was the state of contemplative immersion.

6

Vailshery L. S, Jaganmohan M, and Nagandra H, “Effect of Street Trees on Microclimate and Air Pollution in a Tropical City,” Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, no. 12 (2013). 408, 409.

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Walking on the foreshore. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

Dear Safia, today I crossed over from your thousand year old city. Canberra has clear skies, brittle as glass. I sit on the curb and put my head in my hands. Where have all the people gone? The emptiness of this city, barely one hundred years old. Extract from Dear Safia. Experimental animation. 2015. Walking in Canberra was an immensely different experience in comparison to walking the densely populated spaces of inner Lahore. Significantly, I experienced senses of isolation. Canberra being a predominantly middle class city, I could have found subject matter to reflect this by going to the places where people often collected, such as its public spaces and suburban shopping precincts. But though I went into Civic at times, more often I found myself wandering to places less populated, that felt marginal or peripheral in some way. The studio was close by the lake and it became my habit to amble along its perimeter where my encounters took on a unique meaning as I discovered pockets and niches along its shores, small ‘weedy wildernesses’ hidden and atmospheric. There was something about the fragile life of things that seemed hidden, not wanted, furtive, or ephemeral that attracted me. In weeds, mushrooms, broken furniture, and feral animals I saw the symbols of fringe communities. Remembering these in paintings was not only about invoking the liminal or in-between life of Canberra but a means of suggesting my empathy with these things and how I felt disconnected. Over time and connecting with these aspects, the theme of not/belonging began to emerge and clarify itself. Included in this theme were the stories of people dealing with homelessness or states of transience and so this became a refrain in the Canberra scroll that carried through to subsequent scroll paintings.

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Meetings on the Margins—The Secret Life of Mushrooms

Mushroom and self. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

A route that I often took around the lake followed Dairy Flat road which lead to the suburb of Kingston. Massive waterside developments were advancing out of Kingston but the road itself was as yet quiet, sealed off and bordered by pasture, remaining wetlands, and pockets of wilderness. One day my eye was caught by a family of enormous umbrella mushrooms crouching in the undergrowth, seemingly sprung overnight. One had fallen over and I picked it up carefully, marvelling at its size. Carrying it back to the studio I consulted Bruce Fuhrer’s Field Guide to Australian Fungi and decided it was of the paxillus variety, pungent but non-toxic. I took a bite and found it tasted just like earth.

The Paxillus mushroom. Photograph: Michal Glikson. 2012

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This charismatic mushroom sat on my desk for three weeks before collapsing. I turned it upside down at one point and noted the delicacy of the forked gills beneath its cup. I thought of fairy tales in which mushroom rings featured as doorways to other worlds. I recalled an analogy comparing mushrooms to working class people whereby both ‘live in the dark and are fed on shit’.7 As the mushroom continued to evoke a complex of meanings for me I sought to compress these into an entry in the scroll.

The Language of Collage One of the techniques I used to create an image about the mushroom was collage which is the method of applying material to surfaces to create or enhance images. Collage often utilises paper but almost any two-dimensional material may be applied. The beauty of collage is that materials may be gathered in context, or further afield. These carry their own meanings, references, and resonances that when applied, juxtaposed and layered within images, contribute dimensions of meaning. I had a cache of material for collage, a plastic envelope bulging with scraps and souvenirs I had collected over the past years in India, Australia, and Pakistan. In it, carefully cleaned, pressed, and smoothed were things such as pressed flowers, leaves, bills of foreign currency, labels, packaging, receipts, calling cards, postcards, stickers, letters, and scraps of fabric. I had several such envelopes that I kept handy whilst painting. I liked to sift through my cache, rearranging and curating these precious finds, the paraphernalia of places I had visited or lived in. Leafing through the artifacts assisted and inspired painting as I selected material through which I could evoke the materiality of the spaces I traversed, and of my own life. Sifting now through my cache I came across a fragile hand-written courier’s receipt. I recalled picking it off the floor of a sleepy Indian post office that seemed to have managed to escape being converted to a modern computerised system. Now I pasted into the scroll where it sat, seemingly anomalous. Over part of it I painted a ‘portrait’ of the mushroom, next to which I made an image of myself as a form of hybrid elephant creature.8 Introducing gleaned material into the scroll added dimensions through references to the past, suggesting the work as a repository of moments across time and space. Doing so also contributed to the meaning of the scroll as a place in which I expressed my own sense of being not only between places and cultures, but also between the past and the present.

7

Rick Kuhn, “Class struggle”, Lecture, Classical Marxism, POLS S2061, Faculty of Arts, (The Australian National University, 2004). 8 See self-portraiture, Chap. 3: Illness and its opportunities: storying the self .

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A cache of gleanings I carried during my travels. Photograph: Michal Glikson. 2012

Being a Gleaner My cache had come into being as I became a gleaner. Gleaning is the act of gathering and examining that which people have thrown away and/or classify as rubbish. Gleaning-consciousness came to me in several ways whilst I was studying in Baroda. One involved the realisation that people were coming to sift through my rubbish to glean, which impelled me to clean and sort this, and which in turn found me considering the waste that I personally created. Another way occurred through observations of a young man in the neighbourhood whose customary habit was to move along the streets of Fateganj plucking rubbish off the road as he went, which he arranged and waved like a fan. I found his actions fascinating, and painted him into my scroll.

Being a Gleaner

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The boy picking papers. Detail. Floating in Hindustan. 2008

The boy picking papers. Still from field documentary. 2008

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At heart, gleaning is a peripatetic method involving observation, searching, and movement over time. Anthropologist and gleaner Jeff Ferrell uses gleaning as a process of conducting “a close ethnography” of objects by carefully recording and describing the items. He views the piles he scrounges through as repositories, “material post-mortems, life histories of relationships, accomplishments, and accumulations left at the edge of the street or alley”.9 In Baroda I was curious about the people amongst who I was living, whose language and culture I was beginning to learn about. Gleaning was revealing, as labels and wrappings spoke of local economies, what people consumed, wore out, and worried about. Walking and gleaning went together very well and in this way I began compiling small collections. Professor Steve Pile in his research of human geography suggests gleaning allows for imaginative re-constructions of city life piece-by-piece in the form of lost or discarded objects. Many times gleaning presented me with poignant subject matter in the form of medical receipts, rent notices, personal notes, and the tattered fragments of clothes, toys, and ornaments—things that represented disruption rather than regularity through the accumulated and then discarded debris of people’s lives.10 As an informative, ecological, and sustainable method, I have been fascinated to experience the way that in many cultures gleaning has and still is considered a low status occupation. Gleaning in western societies originally referred to the gathering of leftover crops after agricultural harvests and in Europe such work was often conducted by women who were low-born and of the peasantry. Gleaning in India was and still is regarded as an undesirable and lowly activity and there it is still of the lowest castes and classes whose lot it is to handle the rubbish of society. Wherever I gleaned in Australia, India, or Pakistan, I found my activities gathering meanings whether these were to do with gender, or cultural stigmas attached to those who handled rubbish, or the patent stigma of poverty and unemployment. In Baroda for example, I found acts of openly picking things off the ground and putting them in my bag drew attention, this being something that local people did not expect of foreigners. I saw in this a way to quietly protest the stigma of gleaning as my actions sometimes generated conversations and questions from locals as to what I was doing with the rubbish. I also came to see gleaning as a way to place attention on systemic overproduction and waste. As a method, gleaning worked backwards in that I did not head to the rubbish pile with questions, rather it was through real-time acts of finding, sifting, and sorting that I gathered and extrapolated meanings. Being a gleaner worked on me, making me acutely aware of the waste I generated in my daily life. Bringing found material into my art works, particularly in context of the elite tradition of miniature painting was about actively questioning and redefining ideas about rubbish. Gleaning also encouraged contemplation of the political economy and lifecycle of waste, from the raw materials to the labour invested in package design. I found myself contemplating 9

Jeff Ferrell, “Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging,” (2006). 20. 10 Pile, Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life. 64.

Being a Gleaner

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the psychology of packaging and studies suggesting that the opening of packages or watching these be opened stimulates the nervous system and the production of adrenaline through, it is thought the anticipatory response. In the oceans of past anticipatory responses that waste packaging began to represent for me, its meaning thus continued to expand.

A Lexicon for Travel Painting: Composition Compositing is a device that invites the viewer to immerse in an image whereby to unpack the embedded layers. In miniature painting of Persia composite animals were a feature throughout history of the genre. However there was a definite period when these forms began appearing more often in miniatures of the last third of the sixteenth century. Whilst it uncertain why in particular artists may have become more interested to explore this form of visual play, what is understood is the way that occurrences of effluorescence in miniature painting can be linked to periods when wealth flowed to the Shahs leading to increased patronage of the arts. As an example, periods during the sixteenth century in Iran that saw an increase in demand for single page paintings and drawings rather than manuscripts provided artists with increased opportunities for creativity and experimentation. Indian art theorist Bipin Balachandran has observed how contemporary artists often use composites as they endeavour to pack experiences of dislocation into imagery that represents “a hybrid world of multiple signifiers derived from different sets of cultural codes”. With this he is suggesting that these kinds of images resemble the “unique portmanteaus of a psychological refugee”, and this was true for me for as a device, composites appealed to my impulse to pour ‘everything’ into one image, and to do so through personal and encoded visual language.11 Composites allow for the bringing in of further meanings. In the image below the key figure, the camel is suggested as being innately connected to and inseparable from all the forms represented within. Composites in this sense represented for me a way of thinking about things in their totality, offering a way of integrating the myriad singular aspects I might perceive as I moved through environments. There was also something very satisfying about the process of making a composite and then standing back from it, as a way of grounding these aspects, in such a way that my understanding about the subject represented could expand.

11

Bipin Balachandran, “The Imagined and the Other: Internationalism and Post-Colonial Hybridity in Indian Contemporary Art,” Art and Deal, no. August (2014): 26, 27.

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Composite camel with Attendant. Attributed to Iran, Khurasan. Mughal. Opaque watercolour and ink on paper. 20 cm × 14 cm. circa 16th C. Image courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of New York

The Sleeper

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The Sleeper

Sleeper. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

An example of a composite image that I made whilst in Canberra is the Sleeper. As an image, Sleeper evolved over time, beginning when I took my camera to Civic to conduct an exercise in observational film. In Garema Place I came across a man sound asleep under a pale blue doona, beside the doors of a liquor shop. I was struck by his transitory position that was simultaneously central and yet also marginal. I had my scroll with me and having set up the camera some distance away, took the opportunity to make a quick sketch. The man continued sleeping, oblivious to the world such that even the police who came along at one point could not wake him.

Sleeper in Civic. Still from field documentary. 2012

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The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Sleeper in Civic available to authorised users. (Link) The sketch I made of the sleeper sat untouched in the scroll until some days later when I visited my father. After dinner he had fallen asleep on the sofa and I brought out my scroll intending to sketch him with his face sunken in dreams. Unrolled, my eye lit on the drawing I had made of the sleeper in Civic. I was caught by resemblances between the poses of the two men and their vulnerability as they slept, literally where they had fallen down. Instead of taking a new space in the scroll I decided to superimpose a lighter sketch that I proceeded to make of my sleeping father over the figure of the sleeping man I had drawn in Civic. Superimposing sketches of the sleeper in Civic and of my father, I merged their stories. Though eventually my father and his story became the focus of the painting, I kept the name Sleeper, to remind me of the man in Civic who had provided the original impulse. The next stages of developing the drawing involved adding details in the form of map-style drawings. These came about as through looking at topographical maps in my father’s study that utilised fine flowing lines to identify mountains and valleys. I decided to embed in the figure of my father a street map of his suburb embellished with topographical elements as a way of suggesting his connection to place through these symbolic forms. Embedding figures with visual elements to tell a story was an effective method as it allowed me to explore symbolism and visual metaphor within a recognisable context. By suggesting the context through an outline, in this case the figure of a man, the idea was to offer the viewer an identifier or hand into the image to encourage and assist them with unpacking its inner workings. As images that allow for the integration of diverse visual elements, composite or compound images are a handy lexicon for journey painting. These kinds of images allow for the telling of stories within the constraints of a singular, unified image, which for me as a painter allowed for economising on space, in this case in the scrolls. Through such images I could relate or contrast events and encounters, experiment with creating superimposed layers of meaning, thus exploring a language for suggesting many things simultaneously. Over time I came to see how peripatetic painting was much about distilling multisensory experiences, to literally reflect the ‘layered-ness’ of lived experience. The composite became one of the ways in which I felt able to process experiences as by encapsulating these in singular images that I could stand back from, I could reexperience them in a way that I could take ownership of. Through this controlled rendering of many moments rolled into one I was thus continuing to make sense of them. Within the anatomy of a compound image I found I could put all kinds of material together—life drawings, patterns, motifs, maps and collage. Sometimes composites in subsequent scrolls became collaborations as I built them around drawings or paintings made by people I was spending time with. Essentially the configurations and possibilities with content and form of compound images were I found, limitless.

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Juxtaposition and Its Meaningful Use Juxtaposition encourages a viewer to re-construct a story by encouraging them to move their eye back and forth between images. Juxtaposition in film theory is referred to as montage which could also be thought of as a moving version of collage. As a device or ploy juxtaposition was notably explored by the Soviet filmmaker Lee Kuleshov in the 1920’s. Kuleshov conducted experiments with audiences to observe their response to different arrangements of images, in this way gaining fascinating insights into the nature of our relationship with meaning. Of great importance was his discovery that as humans we tend towards presumptions of meaning and that, as his observations suggested, we can hardly bear to be without it. We are in fact innately adept at constructing meanings through images and able to do so in the absence of a given story or narrative. The way that I used juxtaposition in my scroll was often intuitive. Sometimes I did not set out with an idea to align certain images but it just happened that they came to be beside one another. Nor did I set out to make particular drawings so that the final images would sit together and speak—this would have required a good deal of planning at least more than I felt fit my orientations with the scroll. It was more often that images seemed to happened coincidently or serenditipitously in ways that set up possibilities for me to exploit this innate desire for meaning.12 As an example, while painting the Sleeper I had begun following debates in the media about the damming of the Mary River in Queensland. In this way I learned about the ancient origins, lifespan, and significance of the endangered lungfish to the Gubbi Gubbi tribe.13 I followed my impulse to create a painting of a lungfish close by the sleeper. When read together, the two images connect and generate narrative through their combined symbolism. Their juxtaposition more generally in the scroll thus offered the entire work additional meanings to do with person(s), place, time, orientation, and belonging.

12

Gabe Moura to The Elements of Cinema: A Student’s Guide to the Fundamentals of Filmmaking, 2014, http://www.elementsofcinema.com/editing/kuleshov-effect-and-juxtaposition/. 13 Glenda Pickersgill, Steve Burgess, and Brad Wedlock, F. “Dam Threat to a Decade of Restoration of the Mary River, Queensland” (paper presented at the Proceedings of the 5th Australian Stream Management Conference; Australian rivers: making a difference, Thurgoona, New South Wales, 2007); Jennifer Maharasy to Jennifer Marahasy, June 24, 2006, http://jennifermarohasy.com/2006/ 06/lung-fish-cant-breed-in-dams-gubbi-gubbi-aboriginal-elder/. 02/05/2013.

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With juxtaposition, more often than not intuition was governing the process of placing images in my scrolls and that directing the eye of my viewer through my scroll was as a product of non-conceptual processes. I was inadvertently seeking that which the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky experienced with the paintings of the Italian Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio, “…your will follows meekly and unwittingly, the logical channel of feeling intended by the artist, wandering first to one figure apparently lost in the crowd and then on to the next.”14 Unlike Carpaccio, who may have worked according to a thought-out plan or vision, for me and as described, juxtaposition was something that occurred organically and through acts of making. At times I worried that I did not seem to be able to work in a way that was more in keeping with conceptual practice or that showed planning. At such times I would return to bedrock ideas of practice-led research that emphasise this as a terrain of the unknown. Unsure of my way I looked to others for help with articulating it. The fact was that when it came to painting I was not capable of working in the way of either the fiction film maker or the muralist who is asked to account for the scale of their enterprise. I needed to remember that I was working from life and that this meant following and being able to follow what life offered in its immediacy, through the scroll.

Sleeper and Lungfish juxtaposed in the scroll

14

Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986), 50.

Expressing Alienation

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Expressing Alienation

Keep left you bloody idiot. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

Today the lake was bright, cold, windy. A man raced past on his bicycle shouting out of the corner of his big pink face, “keep left you bloody idiot!” In Canberra I took my sense of feeling an outsider around the lake. At times I would lose myself in thought and forget that the society in which I now roved took ideas of adhering to certain sides of the path extremely seriously. My meandering sometimes brought angry responses from people, such as the pink-faced man, which as experiences emphasised my sense of being caught between cultures and ways of doing things. At such times I would find myself becoming nostalgic about the chaotic, narrow, rubble-filled streets and huge on-foot populations of the Indian subcontinent. I would forget the choking pollution, the maddening noise, the stalkers, the times I had been narrowly missed by a speeding driver or blinkered mule, or had my bag snatched. Despite the wrath of others in response to my walking on the ‘wrong side’, in Canberra I was conscious of the gift of being able to walk, recalling also how in Pakistan people preferred to compress themselves into any form of transport rather than tackle the streets of their city on foot. Experiences of walking in Canberra reconnected me with the lost vision of its architects Walter and Marion Burley Griffin. The Griffins had worked much in India where they developed an appreciation for the centripetal layouts of its ancient cities and for the life of the bazaars and central market places. Embedded in their design of Canberra was an understanding about the need for people to be able to connect with each other, as well as that of the human need for connection with the natural world.

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Researching their design, I learned why the lake and suburbs had been planned to sit in the hollows of the Canberra valley, as with the hilltops set aside as nature reserves most people had a view of nature. I also learned to my surprise that the original design had included a central market juxtaposed to a transportation hub in the form of a railway network. As I walked across the King’s Avenue bridge I could see where it had been planned to be built, which was in the place where the Ministry of Defence now stood. A change of government in 1913 had seen the Burley Griffin’s work systematically sabotaged. Plans went astray, drawings disappeared to resurface only 30 years later, and in 1920 Walter himself gave up, and his post was abolished. Numerous attempts were made in Parliament to scrap the plan, and in the face of such opposition, nothing was done to implement it. The suburbs began to grow in a way that mirrored urban development in America, which was sprawling and centered on the use of automobiles.15 From a walking point of view, the Burley Griffin vision can hardly be recognised in the shape of Canberra today. Significantly the infrastructure that went with their design that had included a light rail network was not implemented and this consequently allowed planning to be dominated by the idea of individually subsidised transport. I remember throughout my childhood how as our suburb slowly expanded, the small, convenient family-run corner shops were outpriced and eventually replaced by large American-style shopping complexes such as Woden Plaza, and Cooleman Court. In 2012, catching buses to and from the university meant passing through several of these malls and their interchanges whereby waiting out the cold in those empty concreted plazas served to increase my sense of Canberra as a lost vision.

A Language in Company Painting In Canberra the feeling of being an outsider kept me searching for language with which to express this. I began thinking about Company School painting on my walks, which often had the effect of plunging me into memories and comparisons of Australia, India, and Pakistan. I had first encountered East India Company School painting during my undergraduate studies. My interest in the genre sparked in a real sense however whilst I was living in India, as I encountered in the architecture and culture things that had been subjects of East India Company paintings. Significantly, 15

Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design since 1880 (New York, UNITED KINGDOM: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014). 25; Urban sprawl was an American phenonemon which developed alongside and in consequence to the US car manufacturing boom of the 1900’s. Some argue that building ideas of the Auto City into Canberra was significant and political in the vision it extended in Australia of car-dependancy, which would be hugely beneficial to the American motor industry.

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in India I began learning about the English Raj informally through life. In conversations people might often share snippets of local and family history, or whilst visiting particular places I would learn about the history of the Raj in that area. I think that this personal, immediate kind of learning shaped the way that I perceived Company School paintings, because in Canberra I found my thinking taken up with the way that works of this genre embodied alienation, and absence of the Indian point of view. In Company paintings those things belonging to India have been itemised and in the process objectified—the people and their culture, but also animals such as the fruit bat depicted in the painting below, as well as plants, and geographical features.

Great Indian Fruit Bat. Attributed to Bhawani Das. Pencil, ink, opaque watercolour on paper. 59.7 × 83.2 cm. Circa 1777– 82. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of New York

Indian artists who worked as Company painters were often traditionally trained miniaturists. In Baroda some of my fellow students came from families with professional artistic lineages as Court painters. Through their practice(s) and through my own training in miniature I had gained an understanding of the rigorous training that the genre involved. These things also coloured my thoughts about Company Painting. I found myself empathising with the native artist who, in order to fit into the cultural and economic paradigm of the Company would have had to adopt a western aesthetic of realism and picture space perspectives. How had artists felt about the work of itemising and cataloguing, work that required that they engage in the objectification of their own cultural and religious icons? In the variety of styles and in the degrees of success that native artists achieved with re-defining India in Company paintings I observed struggles with taking on and reproducing the visual language of the oppressor. Something that further confused me was the way that

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Company paintings were rarely attributed to the artist. This was why, as I searched for language with which to talk about Canberra, pictorial aspects of Company painting suggested themselves to me as visually symbolic of alienation under colonial, and now contemporary rule.16 Perhaps because my walks around the lake took me past particularly monolithic buildings on its foreshore that in their proportions represent the wealth of the nation, I began reading about the role of the English East India Company in the establishment of the New South Wales penal colony. I learned that from its inception the Australian colony had been entirely dependent on trade with India, thereby enabling the Company to retain its trade monopoly. As someone who had been living across these two cultures, I found it significant that this aspect of history had been omitted from my school education, and that I had up until this time remained ignorant about it.17 I took the scroll and sketched by the lake in Commonwealth Park at a point where I could see Parliament House, the National Gallery, and the High Court. Developing these sketches, drawings and paintings of the Company School offered ideas about ways to represent the buildings. I decided to retain the pencil sketches that evoked ideas of the architectural draught in some Company paintings. Instead of referring to photographs, I chose to rely on the subjectivity of my memory. The foreshore of the lake, curated with buildings, looked contrived to me like the set of a theatre. I recalled a style of framing involving ornate embossed paper surrounding certain Company paintings. The association prompted me to paint proscenium arches over my buildings thus implying ideas of the foreshore as a stage. Ornamented with lotuses, symbols of India’s key religion Hinduism, the resulting allegory of the foreshore alluded both to Canberra’s broken vision, and linkages with Australian-Indian colonial history.

16

Mildred Archer and Graham Parlett, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, Indian Art Series (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1992), 129, 30. 17 Binney, Keith. Horsemen of the First Frontier (1788–1900) and the Serpents Legacy. China: Volcanic Productions, 2005. 70–72.

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Domed pavilion. Ink on fabric. Artist unknown. 39.4 × 48.9 cm. Circa 1830. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of New York

A Language in Satire Walking around the lake’s northern shore I would pass a cultural icon known as Captain James Cook Memorial Fountain. I had heard local people deride this feature by calling it “Captain Cook’s Ejaculation”. The fountain and also Commonwealth Place, envisioned by the Burley Griffins as a ‘Forum for the People’ stimulated ideas for satire. In my scroll I represented the fountain with a phallic figure. An idea to use the ‘Jolly Roger’ flag—an ancient motif used by sea pirates to instil terror into the hearts of other seafarers—as a substitute for the Commonwealth flags lining the shore came from an impulse to connect ideas of piracy with Australia’s colonial beginnings. In both cases these replacements also became metaphors for the compromised Burley Griffin vision.18 18

Godden, Mackay, and Logan, “Lake Burley Griffin Heritage Assessment: Report Prepared for the National Capital Authority - Final Report 2009,” (Redfern, NSW, Australia: National Capital Authority, October, 2009), 105. Subsequently I discovered that Australian artist Daniel Boyd had used the motif of the skull to reinterpret Eurocentric perspective of Australian history, notably in portrayals of iconic colonial figures as pirates; Robert Philippe, Political Graphics: Art as a Weapon (New York: Abbeville Press), 16–18.

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Captain Cook’s Ejaculation and Pirate flags, examples of visual satire in Canberra and Other Ideas

It sometimes happened that I wanted to express opinions about some aspect of Canberra that irritated or angered me, for which I used visual satire. Portraying subjects about which I felt ambivalent was about making images that derogated or undermined particular hegemonic conventions, cultural icons, or powerful oppressive figures, and for which I was encouraged by satire and its historical capacity to inflame and defame. Working with the language of satire and caricature I was aware that as an artist in Australia I was in a position of being able to exercise certain freedoms of speech. For example, I was able to share paintings containing imagery that might derogate popular personalities or icons. However I understood that across cultures there were constraints, which if contravened could have serious consequences. Some of my sensibility about this had come from observing censorship in Pakistan and how it impacted the artist Mohsin Shafi, a miniature painter who trained at the National College of Arts. Inspired by photomontages of the Marxist artist John Heartfield, Mohsin had lampooned well known religious and political Pakistani figures in a series of satirical miniatures. The work had been scheduled for show at a prominent gallery in Karachi but when I met with Mohsin and inquired about this he told me that the paintings had had to be taken down after one day. It seemed that word had got out that the works were blasphemous and subsequently death threats were communicated to himself and the curator. Mohsin was badly shaken, having realised that he had experienced the limit to which the Pakistani community would tolerate critical creative expression, even that delivered in the celebrated form of miniature. Consequently he has had to exhibit his work outside Pakistan, a strategy many Pakistani artists have similarly pursued in order to survive.19

19

M. Glikson interview with Mohsin Shafi (Lahore 2014).

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Mohsin Shafi. Until I discovered cooking I was never really interested in politics. Inkjet print. 3 + 1A/P. Size variable. 2015. Image courtesy of the artist

Mohsin Shafi. Whose turn is it to make tea? Collage, ink, photomontage. 60 cm × 26 cm. 2017. Image courtesy of the artist

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Meeting Mr Hungy

Mr Hungy, Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

Early one morning I came across a young man sitting near the ferry launch. He had written on a piece of cardboard propped before him “Hungy, Homeless”. Mr Hungy as I came to call him was pale, emaciated, and wore only a thin hooded sweater against the freezing wind. When I asked him how he was, he replied in a faint voice that he was hungry. I said I’d be back in fifteen minutes with some food. His head lolled back against the post, and I wondered if he was high and trying to dream away the cold. I went back to the studio and collected some homemade dal and boxes of wheat crackers. Back at the ferry, I placed the food in Mr Hungy’s lap and some coins in his hat. His hands lay limply in his lap as he murmured, “Thank you Miss, thank you Miss…thank you…” in a faint, faraway voice. A number of people jogged, cycled, and walked past, but Mr Hungy collected nothing from them but glances. Returning to the studio with Mr Hungy was on my mind, it disturbed me that like other passers-by, I had moved on, leaving him to his fate. I became restless and made phone calls to several Canberra organisations offering emergency accommodation. Each stated that in order to help Mr Hungy he would need to find his own way to them, adding that resources for men were stretched. At best he might find temporary shelter and a meal. I didn’t have a car with which to take Mr Hungy to a shelter, but also he had not asked for help. I felt powerless and tried to redirect this feeling by making a sketch of Mr Hungy from which to develop a painting about him.

Meeting Mr Hungy

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In my painting of Mr Hungy I brought in a crosshatching motif known as rarrk. I first encountered this motif in the Yirrkala Bark Petitions which I had seen on display at Parliament House. The Bark Petitions are formal documents asserting the land rights of the Indigenous Yolgnu community who produced these documents in 1963. As documents, the Petitions bridged the existing Commonwealth law with Indigenous laws of the land in content and form through the surrounding of text with traditional visual vocabulary in the form of motifs that included rarrk. These motifs evoked songlines and connections to country, as well as the particular aesthetic of body paintings and cave murals created by the Yolgnu. The Bark Petitions as such possess dimensions beyond those of normal documents, by visually invoking and asserting ancient human, land, and sea connections.

Petitions of the Aboriginal People of Yirrkala. 14 August and 28 August, 1963. Earth-based pigments, typset, paper, signatures, on bark. Images courtesy Buku Larrynggay Mulka Art Center

I felt drawn to the rarrk as a motif knitting together forms in the margins of the Petitions. I did not know at the time about the complexity of the rarrk, which amongst other things signified brilliance, or shimmering, which the Yolgnu call bir’yun. The rarrk fascinated me for what it offered with regard to a vocabulary for belonging and connections to land. Bringing the motif into paintings I made in Canberra, of which Mr Hungy became an example, as an idea drew strength from the way that the emergence of the Bark Petitions reflected a significant moment in Australia’s history,

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when the Indigenous land rights movement found visual form. This had provided the public with a point of entry towards wider understanding of Yolgnu cosmology. These things coupled with the fact that the Bark Petitions are public documents, furnished a logic for bringing the rarrk into my painting.20 Indigenous Australian artist Lin Onus worked extensively with crosshatching designs in his paintings, often using these to unify forms of land, animals and people, and to visually imply the organic and embedded nature of Aboriginal landrelationships. I was drawn to the work of Onus, which I found helped me to focus my use of rarrk. I wanted to allude to dispossession, to Indigenous cultural values, and to patterns of interconnectedness. Employment of the rarrk on Mr Hungy was also about suggesting the convergence of themes such as the interwoven nature of connections between country and Indigenous people in particular, and a wider form of human dispossession that I perceived in Mr Hungy’s state more generally. Rarrk for me as a piece of language, embodied resonances that I reached to for generating a vocabulary with which to talk about belonging in Canberra, and in other contexts within Australia. Motifs and symbols are strange things in the way that they have lives that extend archetypally, culturally, politically, and historically, sometimes as in the case of rarrk, tens of thousands of years into the past. I saw this aspect of working with motifs as exciting for the journeys that I found myself taken along and which involved learning of their origins, and about the people to whose culture they belonged. The rarrk motif accompanied me as a piece of vocabulary throughout making the Australindopak Archive and for some years more until 2019 when I moved to Yirrkala, the place where the Bark Petitions had been generated. There as I became better acquainted with Yolgnu culture through community life and conversations with Yolgnu elders, my understanding about the motif and its particularity of meaning grew. I realised I had been on a journey with this rarrk, and that I had now come to the place where my knowledge of it could deepen. This was a dense and personal vocabulary, more complex than that which I had discovered in Parliament House, where it had been cut loose in the world as it were, and politicised. As such, from that point my motivations with using it in my paintings changed. It no longer made sense to keep rarrk in my vocabulary and I stopped using it.

The Way of Bowerbird Alongside acts of physical gleaning, in Canberra and further afield I picked up signs and symbols in the way of a ‘Bowerbird’. The idea of the Bowerbird emerged as a way of working for Lin Onus who struggled through his painting to reconcile and assert his cultural identity and Aboriginal and Scottish ancestry. He came to be referred to 20

H. Morphy, “From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power among the Yolngu,” Man 24, no. 1 (1989).28; Lorna Lippman, Generations of Resistance: Mabo and Justice, Third Edition ed. (South Melbourne: Addison, Wesley, Longman Australia Pty Ltd, 1981), 37.

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as “a cultural terrorist of gentle irreverence” with respect to his methodology that involved acts of appropriating cultural material. Onus’ paintings are populated with signs and symbols, material that as he described, he would “forage from the median strip of society”.21 In a powerful way Onus took over his own classification, referring to himself as from “The Bowerbird School…the one where you’re always picking up bits and pieces”. The idea comes from the way that male Bowerbirds create elaborate nests to attract a mate. The bird will fill the nest with foraged items, often of a particular colour, which they arrange and curate. The Bowerbird has become a metaphor for artists who are seekers, who look for particular language with which to reconstruct their experiences. Such artists in their practices often project senses of shamelessless when it comes to appropriating items that may enhance an experience, and their works can have the appearance of repositories. Irreverence and audaciousness were thus important characteristics of Onus’ approach as an artist negotiating cultural dispossession. Though this concept was personal for Onus, as someone struggling with loss of my own cultural inheritance I resonated with the ‘guerrilla tactics’ of the Bowerbird, strategies I could adopt for forging for a vocabulary and voice.22 The idea of the Bowerbird was also helpful to my own understanding of what I was doing as a painter constructing language with which to talk about life and experiences across cultures. Onus’ approach however which stemmed from a deeply personal response to colonisation and dispossession was one I found I could not correlate with that of artists I observed in India and Pakistan. In these countries, and perhaps due to consequent waves of colonisation, artistic appropriation was not viewed as a form of symbolic re-empowerment, but was a common and accepted approach to making art. From ancient texts, such as the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings, to the visual vernacular of the many living folk art traditions, most forms (with significant exceptions) were considered applicable for use in any artistic way. Ideas concerning the expanding cultural relevance of the Shahnameh as an iconic illustrated epic mythologising Persia’s royal dynasties helped me to understand attitudes concerning appropriation in Pakistan and India. Islamic art scholar, Suroosh Irfani sees the Shahnameh as a repository of symbolic and archetypal material that transcends its origins and links to a collective psyche, corresponding to Carl G. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. Speaking to Irfani in 2014 about being a cultural outsider ‘poaching’ from the Shahnameh, he told me that in his view such interactions were welcomed for the way that they affirmed its status as an expanding intercultural text.23 Borrowing from ancient texts and exploring their iconic forms enriched the visual language with which I sought to tell my contemporary cross-cultural stories. Examples of language that I drew on were the intricate fields of pattern that in many 21

Lin Onus, Margo Neale, and Michael Eather, Urban Dingo: The Art and Life of Lin Onus, 1948– 1996 (South Brisbane: Craftsman House in association with the Queensland Art Gallery, 2000). pp 12, 13, 43; Margo Neale, “Lin Onus,” Artlink 20, no. 1 (2000). Accessed 20/7/2015. 22 Onus, Neale, and Eather, Urban Dingo: The Art and Life of Lin Onus, 1948–1996. p 43. 23 Michal Glikson, Interview with Suroosh Irfani, (Gulberg, Lahore, 2014).

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art traditions of India and the Middle East serve as both ornamentation and visual subtext. I also drew on forms I had seen in paintings such as rocks and clouds that had been rendered in ways to evoke figures and faces, and on the way in which plants and trees were rendered unitarily leaf by leaf. Technically also I sought to evoke the refinement of the ancient miniatures illustrations in parts of my paintings through the use of fine line in patterns.

Canberra and other ideas, detail

In the above painting from the Canberra scroll can be seen examples of motifs that I drew from encounters with visual culture in India and Pakistan. The waterlily or lotus were motifs that I had frequently encountered in India, often in religious art, but also commercially on posters, bakery biscuits, food wrappings and textiles. The larger flowerlike form however was one that I first encountered during studies in Australia and which I had adapted from a textile design known as Strawberry Thief by the nineteenth century artist and utopian Socialist William Morris.

“Nobody Owns Anything Anymore”—To Use, or Not to Use? Coming and going between Australia, India, and Pakistan, prior to as well as during my PhD Research project, I thought a lot about whether it was okay for me to work with motifs sourced from other cultures in my paintings. As a non-Indigenous, first generation Australian painter, I had been embodying in my practice approaches and strategies that involved opening to influence and gathering material through encounters with visual culture, as well as methodologies such as the Bowerbird— the re-appropriator and collector. Becoming aware of how I worked with cultural material however was in many ways an evolving process. For example during early travels in India I remember spending my time trying to capture and represent the multiplicity of things, including symbols and motifs that I saw that at the time and

“Nobody Owns Anything Anymore”—To Use, or Not to Use?

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which seemed to me exotic, exciting, and stimulating. In that mode, I was less concerned about what kinds of material I might be capturing and therefore about issues such as appropriation. At the Baroda school, immersed again in a critical, academic context, I began thinking about cultural appropriation. However, my teachers explained that this was not an issue because in India, appropriative approaches had been going on for thousands of years, and that “nobody owns anything anymore”. Thus in India and Pakistan my common experience, with important exceptions, was that cultural and religious material was regarded as an open resource. A pattern, motif, icon, symbol or style might be specific, even sacred, to a context and community, as the rarrk was in Australia, but as I observed in India, no matter how culturally specific, there was no critique suggesting that a motif could not be copied, adopted, adapted, decontextualised, and recontextualised. I was often shocked at the way I saw classmates and professional artists appropriating visual and other kinds of cultural material, and yet as Indians, those materials as they told me, were theirs to use. They encouraged me to do the same but I often found myself in dilemmas about whether to work or to not work with cultural material. The problem for me, in developing an approach to working with cultural material, arose as I tried to remain true to my prior education and training in which divergent ideas were being practised. I understood that for Lin Onus appropriation had been political, enunciative, a response to cultural dispossession. And that in India artists had developed a way of working with its own logic and basis. But as a non-Indigenous, non-Indian visual storyteller moving across cultures, albeit one struggling with personal cultural disjuncture, I was unsure what position to adopt. At times, and in particular contexts, I was able to come up with good arguments for working with material, such as in Canberra regarding the use of rarrk from the Yirrkala Bark Petitions. But at other times I juggled with the different paradigms, worried about permissions and ethics, and stalled, not knowing how to proceed. It took time for me to understand that appropriation was a subjective process and a developmental one, and that in my liminal, cross-cultural position it was not always useful to compare my approach to other artists. What was useful was taking the time to consider material in terms of its importance to storytelling. I began to think that considering material in an ongoing way might be the best course of action. Perhaps a motif would be okay to use at a particular time in a certain context, and perhaps it might not be later on. I learned to stand back and consider my impulses or urges to use particular visual material. What felt essential to making a painting, and what could be expressed in other ways? Were there respectful ways of working with forms, considering that I might know very little about these? These were the kinds of questions emerging for me as a cross-cultural storyteller wanting to respond and make from a place of awareness, and respect.

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Srilamanthula Chandramohan I encountered important exceptions to the otherwise relaxed approach to appropriation in India and Pakistan and which offered additional challenges to thinking about using cultural material in painting. One exception came through learning about the case of Srilamanthula Chandramohan, a 23-year-old painting student who had studied at Baroda. In his final Masters exam Chandramohan drew on the iconic figure of Durga, the mother goddess and a major member of the Hindu religious pantheon for a painting that realistically depicted her in the act of giving birth. Unfortunately, Chandramohan’s intention to humanise the goddess was misconstrued by local religious Hindu fundamentalists who were inflamed, deeming the image as “obscene”. As members of the radical and powerful Bhaharat Janata Party and Hindutva organisation Shiv Sena, the objectors were able to raid the art faculty during which they confiscated the painting. They were also able exert sufficient influence that saw Chandramohan imprisoned for many days. His fellow students and members of staff protested in the form of extended sit-downs and hunger strikes but the debacle had the effect of crippling the faculty in ways from which it has never quite recovered. Significantly Chandramohan himself has suffered greatly through official restrictions to his movement in Gujarat and through the withholding of his certificate of graduation, and tertiary qualification. He has not been able to leave Baroda, nor find gallery representation or employment. In despair on February 2, 2018 Chandramohan took matters into his own hands and set fire to the Vice Chancellor’s office, after which he was again imprisoned. At the time of completing this book, his fate remains undecided.24 Chandramohan’s life has been inexorably shaped through his decisions with painting. From a rural community, he was significantly the first person from his village to attend university. The problem was that as a student he was not aware of the implications of his actions, even though he was working in a culture with which he was familiar. Chandramohan’s situation was in this way similar to how a peripatetic painter might work, in that he had been operating outside of the known realm, without sufficient guidance, engaged and immersed in the act of responding and making. This had left him at risk through not perceiving the wider implications of his work. Maintaining an art practice across cultures means finding ways of stepping back and gauging implications, even whilst holding a vision, and staying true to one’s creative impulses. Though challenging, this ability to sustain a wider view of one’s work in the world is important. It may be that ultimately as the storyteller, the artist deems it important to go through with particular creative choices, the important thing being that consequences are anticipated and planned for. The capacity to forecast challenges is much a part of what defines nomadic painting and is where some of the most creative thinking is asked for in terms of negotiating adversities, limitations, obstacles, and constraints as part of sustaining practice. 24

Baroda censorship 2005; Shukanya Santha, “Suspended for a Decade for Paintings of Gods, Student Returns to Torch Vc’s Office,” The Wire, 04/02/2018 2018.

In the Caravan of Ling

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In the Caravan of Ling

The Caravan of Ling. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

In Canberra I had difficulty finding work to supplement my scholarship. This added to the stress of crossing cultures in terms of adjusting to the vastly different economies of Pakistan and Australia. In Lahore, where one Australian dollar had fed me for a day, that dollar bought half an apple, maybe a whole one if I shopped at an outer suburban market. Moving between economies as disparate as those of Australia and Pakistan was a challenging aspect of my art practice. I had difficulty coming to terms with the discrepancy and this did odd things to my head. As an example, I could not seem to keep myself from automatically converting dollars into rupees which meant that I was constantly freaking out about the cost of living. Financial anxiety found me hunting for the cheapest accommodation, which I located in the form of a tiny caravan parked in a suburban backyard of Mawson. The address was, as chance would have it, just down the road from a candy-coloured Mandir, replete with domes, curly trimmings, and puja bells, lovingly tingled each dawn by the priest for the Hindu community of Woden and Tuggeranong. The caravan belonged to Ling who was Chinese and, I discovered, a real live Mandarin princess. Ling had immigrated with her husband to Australia some fifteen years previously, her dowry financing his economics degree. Upon graduating, Ling’s husband had found an excellent position in the public service, and a new wife, as he had abandoned Ling and their two small children in favour of her younger and more nubile niece.

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Ling was physically tiny, but her son and daughter were strangely gigantic. We shared economic anxieties, Ling’s personal preoccupation being the sourcing of cheap or discounted food. All over Canberra Ling would forage and sometimes I joined her. Abandoning sense, we would drive from Woden to the far flung suburbs of Tuggeranong and Gungahlin in search of edible bargains in the course of which we blew all our savings on fuel. Clothing that expressed something of Ling’s history and cultural heritage as well her person wardrobe gave me ideas for a portrait. She had a favourite pair of jeans with a top button that would no longer up do up which she wore about the house. Ling’s uncommon ancestry conjured an image in my mind of a traditional style of Chinese robe with overlong sleeves. In certain dynasties, robes with sleeves that hung down well past the hand were worn by those born into nobility. Overlong sleeves restricted movement and evoked the idea that the performance of ordinary tasks was beneath the status of the wearer, and such sleeves were strictly limited to clothing of the Chinese elite. In my picture of Ling I depicted her wearing such a robe cut to reveal her jeans, as a way of signifying the duality of culture and class that her life in Australia had come to encompass.

Possum of Liversidge Street

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Possum of Liversidge Street

Possum of Liversidge street. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

At the studio the possums of Liversidge street would appear at dusk and saunter about. There was one who slept through the day, unaware that he had ensconced himself in a fan shaft, which we were careful to never switch on. There was one who would come up and sip tea from my offered cup, and another who would waddle past at the same hour each afternoon with her baby clinging precariously to her back. With their fearlessness, bright, fathomless eyes, and distinct personalities the possums were for me as persons and I would become upset at hearing them labelled as ‘pests’. I took heart however in evidence strongly suggesting that the possums were unconcerned as to what humans thought of them. With the possums I began thinking about “the imaginative act that threw thinking, sentient, intentional, and animate beings into the black box category of ‘nature’.”25 I also began critically considering ideas that suggest to anthropomorphise and personalise the world is about becoming more able to meet it, attributing human behaviour, and characteristics to non-human subjects such as animals, natural phenomena or inanimate objects. For me this explanation was unsatisfying as it reduced the genuine curiosity and interest I felt about the lives of animals, such as the possums of Liversidge street, to the idea that these lives only had importance as 25

Kay Anderson, “Animal Geographies/Human Identities” in Animal Geographies: Place Politics and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, ed. Wolch Jennifer and Jody Emel (London and New York: Verso, 1998). 30.

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extensions of myself. As an artist my desire was to understand beings that, like me, are part of a greater whole which I cannot see and which essentially cannot be met through reductionism. The anthropomorphic idea suggests that members of the non-human world are only useful insofar as they reflect the human paradigm, and that this is the only way we can see them. But I saw non-humans as having their own special and unique stories of which I would sometimes be offered a glimpse. As a storyteller this was and has continued to be about accepting that I might never see the ‘whole picture’, believing that the picture that I could put together need not be reduced to anthropomorphising, or personalisation. As a process this has also been about preferring to think that the pictures and stories form through genuine sets of observations of distinct non-human personalities, and of distinct non-human cultures.26

The Merry Go Round in Civic

Captain Cook on Carousel. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

Canberra as the city in which I grew up often became a terrain of memories from my childhood. In Petrie Plaza, Civic, Canberra’s central shopping precinct there was an old carousel, or merry-go-round. Large, ornate, and in perfect working order, the carousel was at least a century old, having been constructed in Australia for a German showman using German, Scottish, and Australian parts. It had been stationed AMERICAN HERITAGE® DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, FIFTH EDITION. S.v. “Anthropomorph.” http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Anthropomorph; Jung, C. G, Man and His Symbols, Picador Books, London, 1978. 4.

26

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in Melbourne’s St Kilda Esplanade for many years 1973 when it was purchased as a gift to the people of Canberra for $40 000. I was perhaps five years old when my parents first took me for a ride. I remember clutching my painted horse amidst the deafening organ music, captured by the central column with its mirrors and beautiful hand-paintings of pastoral scenes. What with these, two huge elephants, and fiftytwo hand-carved horses with real horsehair tails, rides on the carousel were large and unforgettable experiences. On my first walk into Civic I made a bee-line for the carousel, that visceral link to the Canberra of my childhood. I bought tickets and rode, wondering at this experience that forty years later still felt enormously magical. Ensconced within this ‘world’ I watched Civic go by. I had a curious experience in which real life appeared surreal and fictitious, like a painted moving panorama. For the first time I noticed the names of the horses. “Land Tax”, “Aristocrat”, “Morse Code”, “Free Rule”, “Usage”, “Great Art” and wondered at the picture they painted of early twentieth century Australian society. The next day I returned with my scroll to sketch and make recordings of the organ music. By the time I was back in the studio sitting with the sketches, initial impulses to create an image speaking to my golden memories of the merry go round had faded. The strangely dry, capitalist names of the horses overtook my thoughts. I had rolled the scroll out on my table to the image I had made about the Captain Cook Fountain. This, together perhaps with the names of the horses prompted a drawing of a figure hovering above a carousel style horse. Painting, I clothed the figure in a red and gold colonial-style coat and hat, and the horse with a flowered saddle. At one point I paused with the thought that this was no longer a horse, and altered the head to resemble a crow. The idea to add a figure of an eyeless white cockatoo came partly in recalling these birds flocking along the lake, making their hoarse, heart-cracking calls.

Land Tax, one of the horses on the Civic carousel

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Rabbits of Lake Burley Griffin

Rabbit at lake’s edge. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

It took me months to properly acknowledge the herds of rabbits living at the lake, though these had been springing across my path since the first day I walked the shore. One day I found myself gazing at them, mesmerised by their quintessential hyper-vigilance. I thought about how they had been forcefully introduced into the Australian context only to be subsequently relegated to that category of species now deemed ‘pests’. I saw that I had also unquestioningly adopted this idea, and yet the rabbits were, like the mushrooms, the homeless people, and the weeds, a marginalised community of the foreshore. Observing the rabbits further, I found myself wondering at the way that some ran, flaunting the white of their tails whilst others continued grazing, their fawn coats merging into the brownish grass of the foreshore. I wondered too if these were the designated sentries of the tribe, running bravely to attract attention, warning and simultaneously shielding the rest of the herd.

The Woman Who Runs in All Weather

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The Woman Who Runs in All Weather

The woman who runs in all weather. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

She runs every day, rain or shine, hot or cold. She is perhaps sixty-five, light as a feather, and thin as a twig. She shuffles on and on, looking straight ahead, never slowing to a walk. If I went walking early in the morning around the southern end of the lake I was bound to encounter a woman who looked to me to be about sixty five. She ran daily no matter what the weather, her frame slight and lost in a large lemon sou’wester. She would run towards me, and pass, and I would turn and watch her fade into the distance. I wondered about her, seeing something of myself in her lonely lake marathons. I’m not able to sketch the woman jogging from life but I see her so often that I find myself able to draw her image from memory. I’m getting better at this, though the lines are wispy and hesitant. They lack the emphatic quality of line about which John Berger writes and which suggest that the artist has experienced deep connection with their subject. But the quality of tenuousness in my connection with the woman who ran in all weather is the reality, and reflects itself in the lines I make.

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In the Carpark at Kingston Wetlands

In the carpark at Kingston Wetlands. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

When leaving the studio to go walking, I had choices. If I leaned to the left I would pass the fancy Lake hotels, Ferry moorings, and Commonwealth Bridge. Further on past Commonwealth Park there would be the tiny cottage of the settler Blundell, a souvenir of Canberra’s humble beginnings, and then Scrivener Dam. At this point I often turned right along Dairy Flat Road where the land was being used to raise lawnturf, after which I would come to the edge of Kingston. A huge waterside housing and commercial development in progress had begun taking over the foreshore and wetlands. Nearby crouched a tiny portion of these watersoaked areas, a sanctuary for the lake’s birdlife called ‘Kingston Wetlands’. Coming to the Wetlands one day, I found what appeared to be the entire contents of an apartment dumped in the car park. Someone had left beds, a coffee table, sofa and chairs, magazines, coffee cups, beige and brown curtains, and a host of other paraphernalia. It had begun as one of those wet, bright days, and everything was steaming in the morning light. I discovered dog and cat bowls, shelves, a large striped mattress, crockery, cutlery, plastic lunchboxes, dented pots, non-stick pans with teflon peeling, jars of cold cream and makeup, a plastic bag of cheap costume jewellery. Peering into a mug fallen on the ground I discovered a large spider of the Huntsman variety. I put my face close to the rim. From inside came a strange, thin, high little voice, lilting and dipping in a lyric soprano. Spider opera, amplified by the acoustics of the cup.

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The abandoned ‘apartment’ occupied by the singing spider had a quality of weirdness, disrupting my senses of Canberra and its ordinariness. They became entries in my scroll, and later on stories in which I took pleasure relating long after I had left that part of the world.

The Man with the Bicycle

The man with the bicycle. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

It is late afternoon in winter. I am crossing the university campus on my way to the studio. Between the clouds, shafts of light, golden but cold are showing the way to evening. A man is shuffling slowly past me wheeling a bicycle, muffled to the mouth in an old green sou’wester. The shafts of gold light fade, the temperature is dropping and my eye catches on the man’s bike which I now see is laden with bundles and plastic bags hanging front, sides and back. Though his shape is obscured by layers of clothing, I see his face beneath its beanie, sharp-boned and hollow cheeked. His pale blue eyes are steady, patient and forbearing. I stop, feeling a pang of frustration because I cannot see what to do for him. Should I ask him if he is okay? He appears to be searching the locality, in that subtle way that people do when they are casting about for a place to bed down. It is going to be a freezing night. As the man walked away from me, I looked around the campus full of buildings containing warm carpeted spaces with lounges, kitchens stocked with food, soap, hot water, things this man could use. So many warm empty places, and every one of them locked.

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Thoughts about homelessness called to mind a story I had heard in a staffroom in the university. It concerned a guest researcher from India who after a time had been discovered to be living in his office. I remember the outraged tone of the person relating the story as I listened, but I had said nothing. It occurred to me that it must be difficult for those who had not lived across economies as disparate as Australia and India to comprehend the money that could be saved over a year by not renting a room in Canberra, and the fortune that this translated to in an Indian context—enough to induce someone into undergoing quite some discomfort, not to mention the risk losing of losing their job. As I watched the man wheel his bicycle and worldly possessions into the dusk, a line of verse came to my mind—“water everywhere and nary a drop to drink”. I thought how in some ways Canberra no longer seemed so different to Lahore, as a city encompassing great contradictions and disparity.

Woman in a Corner

Woman in a corner. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

For a few weeks I had been seeing a woman camping in the alcove of a shop in Civic. She appeared to be elderly, and sometimes would be lying down on a piece of plastic, her form submerged in a doona. Sometimes she would be sitting up and I would see her holding a fruit, daintily peeling it in spirals with a knife. To see elderly women sleeping rough in an organised, wealthy city such as the capital of Australia was something I found hard to comprehend. Over the course of the year I was to observe many women living rough in corners of Canberra, sleeping in better lit areas where perhaps it was safer. Making portraits of these

Woman in a Corner

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women was about reaching to understanding of their circumstances. I began calling charities to inquire about services for homeless women. This was how I learned of the severe shortage of emergency shelter despite documented increases in the numbers of women needing it. One charity that ran a mobile soup kitchen in the city told me that many women who were homeless had become so after lifetimes of having homes. The working lives of these women, interrupted by the unpaid work of having children, raising families, and housework meant that their superannuation savings were minuscule, preventing individual security and home ownership. I was told that a common story concerned marriages dissolving, or a husband leaving either through death or abandonment. For women in this position this meant the loss of the home and, without support, nowhere to go but the street.

Maryam

Maryam the artist. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

Wandering through Civic I might see a woman who I came to know as Maryam, and whom, accompanied by a large tartan trolley, would invariably be sitting in the open or in a café, sketching in a large pad. One time I boarded a bus to Dickson to find Maryam inside, curved into a front end seat. Her face was turned to the ceiling and I noticed a yellow tinge to her complexion. She was emaciated and appeared very frail, yet I continued to sight her pulling her trolley round Civic that year, conducting her drawing with focus and commitment in a way that I found inspiring.

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I never introduced myself to Maryam through I would have liked to. I felt that this might disrupt her work, but also I felt shyness. Yet I began to look out for her, and took inspiration from her practice. She was the only artist I ever observed drawing from life in Canberra that year, and my portrait of her came together through such chance sightings and memories.

Our Lady of the Trolley

Our Lady of the Trolley. Canberra and Other Ideas. Detail

Late one afternoon I was at the lake near Commonwealth Bridge when I saw a tall dark woman pushing a supermarket trolley piled full of bags. She was going so fast she seemed to fly down the path. I feared she might crash but she sped on round the lake, towards the National Gallery. I looked to see if she was being chased but there was no one following her. There were other chance sightings of this woman, one time as she was standing in Civic, under a street lamp. Moths circled in the lamplight above and her bags were strewn round her. She was singing jazz songs, in a voice like an incarnation of Nina Simone. Another evening on a bench outside the supermarket, she huddled, lost in the folds of a large coat. This time I stopped and asked her if she was warm enough. The air crystallised between us in the cold as she answered that she was all right, thank you with lucid eyes in a highboned face. I offered her money and a small, thin hand reached out and back into the enormous coat. All the while my mind was running on with wondering about her, how she came to be in this state that

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so contradicted her appearance, for she looked like a fashion model, and her voice was as clear, and as cultivated as that of an SBS anchorwoman, or United Nations ambassador. I called the woman ‘Our lady of the trolley’ because of the dignity and also mystery I felt she embodied, and to which I sought to refer through a composite involving a portrait of her, the symbolism of a moth, and that of various floral motifs.

Planning for the Next Scroll: Influences and Guides Planning for the next scroll was going to involve leaving Australia for a period of twelve months of itinerant life in India and Pakistan. My intention was to divide this time between each country. The year as a length of time came as I modelled my fieldwork upon anthropological approaches to research. These often utilise extended periods as a means to facilitate depth of engagement and trust between subject and researcher. The timeframe was also about building in an allowance for factors that might slow my pace of working such as the seasons of summer and monsoon. Time was important too for other reasons, such as the idea that my journeys were not intended to be strictly linear progressions but would involve modes of oscillation, in which I wanted to allow room for spontaneity, the following of impulses or hunches, and changes in plan. Ideas of oscillation had come to me from thinking about wandering as a way in which artists, painters, and writers encountered their material. I loved the paintings of John Wolseley in which details spoke of oscillatory modes of navigating country, observing its ecological shifts in terms of botanical, and topographical diversity, with materials in tow. Such modes allowed him to create paintings testifying to the biodiverse nature of terrains, and of which an example for me was his collection Painting the Wallace Line. Making this work had involved the artist in a four years passage of exploratory, immersive and unfolding discovery through the Indonesian archipelago. The way that Wolseley moved was his means of understanding and mapping this part of world in painting, a way which he described as, “…back and forth between the various islands and continents on each side of the line documenting the differences and correspondences I have found…”40 The poetic logic of Wolseley’s process through which the artist becomes increasingly sensitised, enables observations that have been described as “divided recombining destinies” in which he artist “sees the different habitats superimposed… hears the different sonic spectra together [and becomes] the collector of interference patterns, the connoisseur of fringes.”41 Wolseley is often referred to as a ‘painter-naturalist’ for the way that his observations focus with representing the diversity of ecosystems. Though I was planning to situate myself in urban areas, cities and villages, some of which would be densely populated and/or abjectly polluted environments, I was drawn to his processes, to the possibilities inherent in bringing together and bridging resemblances in circumstances (and destinies) that I too might observe with subjects I painted.

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Travelling and painting was going to involve complex challenges psychologically as well as physically. Psychological challenges arose from uncertainty about many aspects of my itinerary which could not be confirmed until on route. Uncertainty lay also in the way that I intended travelling solo which in some of the cultures where I was going, for a woman was considered unusual and somewhat perilous. These aspects of travel found me looking for models or guides who might be artists, but also people who worked in other mediums such as writing, documentary film, anthropology, and ethnography, and whose peripatetic practices had furnished them with trustful experiences as well as creative spaces. Ideas of trust as well as of opening to influence in context of travel, found me looking into the genre of journey writing. I found the accounts of writer and explorer Freya Stark (1893–1993) and her travels in the Middle East and across Central Asia offering me insights into the possibilities of peripatetic practice. Stark dialogued about the psychological aspects and social interactions yielded through travel, as well as opening up about the dynamics of uncertainty and serendipity. Her methods were considered unorthodox for her time as she worked only with a native guide, and was therefore considered to be otherwise unchaperoned. I resonated with Stark on a number of levels, one of which was the fact that she was not wealthy and conducted her journeys on a tight budget. Her approach of wanting to socialise with and get to know native people, whose stories fill her accounts also spoke to me. Despite her vulnerable position as a foreigner and woman, Stark felt no imperative to formulate complex strategies of survival rather she was relaxed even buoyant about the possibility of receiving assistance, and her accounts are testimonies to the kindness and hospitality of ‘strangers’. Her perspectives about travelling without a companion from her own culture were likewise positive as she felt that this made it easier for people to respond to her as an outsider, saying, “When you are there mixing with locals on your own, people forget you belong to another civilisation.”27 Stark’s willingness to practice immersion in her journeys allowed her to learn about the culture of her host. She adapted to wearing native dress, polished her Arabic, eating and drinking local food and using local medicines, and often slept in barns and other humble places, or with local women. Although importantly economical, these ways were the source of her writing by providing intimate cultural experiences that few other foreigners could boast of. Her way of travelling embodied a key incentive in peripatetic practices which is to notice subtle variations in culture and environment. Yet despite Stark’s achievements, she remained for many years an underdog in the academic and explorer worlds as her methods subverted anthropological research that at the time positioned the researcher as a detached observer.28 In the richness of lived experience described in Stark’s accounts I found parallels concerning my aims with painting. Her use of intuition and the hunch as a way of making decisions resonated with me as did her willingness to embrace the incidental, and the invitation. Almost daily Stark describes acts of intuition through which she takes the offered hand to find herself in the homes of people she doesn’t know, or on 27 28

Dame Freya Stark, interview by Sue MacGregor, 20th May, 1976. Ibid.

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a route she isn’t sure about.29 From a methodological perspective Stark’s intuitive and importantly trustful approach suggested itself to me as a means whereby as an artist, traveller, and single woman could negotiate the unknown and surprising nature of journey through embracing its openings.30 The practices of artists such as Wolseley and Stark provided strong examples of engaging productively and sustainably across cultures in diverse, challenging, often provisional conditions. But they also provided me with examples of extraordinary and successful artists whose work had not suffered for lack of self promotion or reportage. In an age when technologies internet blogging, vlogging, and other means of reportage this was important to me because at the time of planning my journey these kinds of tools were being presented as the new way. In deciding against using v/blogging, Instagram or other social media tools I was not only anticipating challenges of accessing internet, and power during my travels. Choosing to not maintain a live journey blog was also about seeking to prioritise immersion, a decision that came out of my respect for the methods of artists such as Wolseley, Stark, and travel painters of previous eras such as William Simpson. Alongside the chronicling activities that developed with my scrolls I did however keep an offline blog, as a way of backing up videos, notes and writing I was doing on my laptop computer. This was a good thing as several times throughout my journeys my computer and drives had problems and/or suffered damage so that had I not backed up, I could have lost a good deal of data. My itinerary included places and contexts to which I wanted to travel with the idea to spend time with people, namely artists from whom I hoped to learn. Some of these artists belonged to a community known as Chitrakars, who lived in a rural part of West Bengal. The Chitrakars practised a caste-inherited folk art form called Patuya Sangit or Painting-Song. As artists they embodied a model for travelling and storytelling that I hoped to observe in action. However planning time with them prior to my journey was not possible as I had no formal connections to these communities. I had learned of one community who lived in a village called Naya through the research of Frank Korom and his book, Village of Painters. I thought I might connect with Patuya Sangit practitioners through friends in Baroda, or teachers at the Baroda School, and perhaps through staff or researchers at Viswa Bharati university in Santiniketan which was also a research destination in Bengal. Still sometimes I wondered if I might have to simply travel to Naya, front up and knock on the Chitrakars door, and introduce myself as it were. Another artist whose practice I wished to observe was miniature painter Anindita Bhattacharya. I was particularly interested in her work with pattern and the way that she was using this to inlay visual subtext in her paintings. I had stayed in contact with Bhattacharya since our time at the Baroda School hence she knew of my interest in her work and had agreed to my staying with her awhile. She lived in Gurgaon, a

29

Ibid. S. J. Lewis and A. J. Russell, “Being Embedded: A Way Forward for Ethnographic Research,” Ethnography 12, no. 3 (2011). 400.

30

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satellite city of Delhi, where I would be arriving. Spending time with her, I hoped to gain sufficient skill with pattern to be able to use it throughout my journey. From Gurgaon I planned to travel to Baroda city to work with a designer on a display case for my scroll. I had an idea for a case based on pictures I had seen of moving panoramas, extended paintings that were viewed slowly using rollers. Moving panoramas had became popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Europe and then in America where they were often featured at circuses. Baroda had many factories manufacturing products in acrylic and perspex and this had given me the idea to have a prototype created there. Being in Baroda would also give me an opportunity to reacquaint myself with the city, its life, and with people I knew there. In Canberra, emerging themes of belonging had influenced the kind of imagery I made in the scroll. The idea to expand this theme in subsequent scrolls suggested the inclusion of contrasting stories of belonging by spending time in deeply rooted communities. The Chitrakar community of Naya in Bengal suggested possible material, for it was known that they had been practising in that part of the world for some hundreds of years. There were also communities in northern Pakistan located along the ancient Silk Route, an important trade route once connecting the Indian subcontinent to China and Central Asia, in the Hunza valley. I had visited this area in previous years and recalled its villages of stone laid over a thousand years ago, and its hospitable culture. I thought that if I could reach before winter set in then there too, I might gather interesting and useful material for paintings.

References Anderson, Kay. 1998. Animal geographies/human identities. In Animal geographies: Place politics and identity in the nature-culture borderlands, ed. Wolch Jennifer and Jody Emel. London and New York: Verso. Archer, Mildred, and Graham Parlett. 1992. Company paintings: Indian paintings of the British period. Indian Art Series. London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Balachandran, Bipin. 2014. The imagined and the other: Internationalism and post-colonial hybridity in Indian contemporary art. Art and Deal August: 26–29. Godden, Mackay, and Logan. 2009. Lake Burley Griffin Heritage assessment: Report prepared for the National Capital Authority—Final report 2009. 115. Redfern, NSW, Australia: National Capital Authority. Hall, Peter. 1880. Cities of tomorrow: An intellectual history of urban planning and design since 1880. New York, United Kingdom: Wiley. Lejeune, Philippe. 2009. On diary. Honolulu, HI, USA: University of Hawaii Press. Lewis, S.J., and A.J. Russell. 2011. Being embedded: A way forward for ethnographic research. Ethnography 12 (3): 398–416. Lippman, Lorna. 1981. Generations of resistance: Mabo and Justice, 3rd ed. South Melbourne: Addison, Wesley, Longman Australia Pty Ltd. Morphy, H. 1989. From dull to brilliant: The aesthetics of spiritual power among the Yolngu. Man 24 (1): 21–40. Moura, Gabe. 2014. The Kuleshov effect: Creating meaning with editing. In The elements of cinema: A student’s guide to the fundamentals of filmmaking. Neale, Margo. 2000. Lin Onus. Artlink 20, no. 1.

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Onus, Lin, Margo Neale, and Michael Eather. 2000. Urban Dingo: The art and life of Lin Onus, 1948–1996. South Brisbane: Craftsman House in association with the Queensland Art Gallery. Pickersgill, Glenda, Steve Burgess, and Brad Wedlock. 2007. Dam threat to a decade of restoration of the Mary River, Queensland. Paper presented at the proceedings of the 5th Australian stream management conference; Australian rivers: Making a difference, Thurgoona, New South Wales. Stark, Dame Freya. 1976. Dame Freya Stark. By Sue MacGregor. Woman’s Hour (20th May 1976): 7:20mins. Tarkovsky, Andrey. 1986. Sculpting in time: Reflections on the cinema. Translated by Kitty HunterBlair. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Vailshery L.S., M. Jaganmohan M., H. Nagandra. 2013. Effect of street trees on microclimate and air pollution in a tropical city. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening 12: 408, 09.

Chapter 3

Australia and India: The Second Scroll: Australind

In this chapter I describe the process of developing Australind, the second scroll in the Australindopak Archive, which gathered its name through the way that content bridged experiences in Australia and India. The scroll chronicles the time from whence I relocated from Canberra to a small farm in Queensland in December 2012 until I cross the Indo-Pakistan border in November the following year. Early sections in this chapter examine how this scroll became a space in which to negotiate senses of not/belonging on the farm, whilst later sections show how these senses draw me to stories that I consider in paintings throughout travel in India. Travel in India takes the shape of a large loop that begins in the capital New Delhi and the satellite city of Gurgaon. Importantly the shape of my journey becomes unexpectedly and increasingly characterised by methodologies of the invitation, as well as oscillation. After several weeks the loop of my journey takes me south to the industrial city of Baroda where I spend time with colleagues, craftspeople, sugarcane pressers, and have many encounters on its streets. From Baroda my path leads east to Bengal. It is the season of the monsoon, and with my scroll I find myself oscillating between Kolkata and localities in rural West Bengal such as the university town of Santiniketan and the tiny rural village of Naya. In Naya I am invited to stay with a community of Chitrakars, artists who practice the folk art form Patuya Sangit or Scroll Singing. After five months I journey back across northern India by train to Delhi, stopping on the way at Kanpur, to sketch at the historic site of Sati Chaura or Massacre Ghat. This chapter concludes as I cross the Indo-Pakistan border, and as the Australind scroll coincidentally runs out of paper, in December 2013.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Glikson, Peripatetic Painting: Pathways in Social, Immersive, and Empathic Art Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4005-6_3

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Map of Sunshine Coast Hinterland and Hunchy

Painting in Hunchy Hunchy is the name of an area folded beneath the lip of the Blackall Range between the small high towns of Montville and Mapleton established in 1887 and 1894, and reaching down to the town of Palmwoods which was settled in 1881. Hunchy began as a cluster of selections for which the conditions of settling required heavy logging of the forested hills. As settler families had grown, the farms had been divided, or the land had been re-zoned. Many families had then sold off small portions of their farms enabling newer arrivals called ‘tree-changers’ for the way that these people were exchanging life in cities for life on bushy or forested plots.

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My parents’ farm was a ten acre plot which had been heavily logged by previous owners and used for grazing cattle. In the twenty five years that my family had been there, they had worked to reforest the land, by keeping cattle off and by planting native trees and plants. Though surrounded by trees, the ground on which the house was set was high allowing for seeing on clear days to the ocean. From the veranda of the house the eye travelled across swells of green hills and volcanic plugs—the Glass Houses, so named by Captain Cook when he sailed past them in 1770 for the way they reminded him of kilns in his town of Yorkshire. I took to walking and hanging around in different parts of the farm. Sitting in its high parts and hollows, listening to the valley on warm still summer days, looking to the ocean. I wondered whether two hundred years ago the indigenous people might have sat and looked in the same places. Who knows, perhaps they had even seen the sails of Cook’s ship as he steered it down the coast to Sydney Cove.1 I had not wanted to begin painting the second scroll in Hunchy. It wasn’t that the verdant beauty of the area didn’t affect me with its colours and scents, but that I felt unprepared and unequipped for negotiating its complex histories. These seemed rife with contested stories and information. Settler accounts in particular had the effect of unsettling me for the way that they took little notice of or misunderstood the Indigenous people and I found such things as impediments to painting. My idea had been to begin the scroll in India, to continue it in Pakistan, and to end my painting journey back in Canberra. Hunchy was to me a transitory point, but this plan began unravelling with delays concerning visas for India and Pakistan. I was running about two months behind schedule when I realised that by not painting where I happened to be I was contradicting my own ideas about nomadic methodology. I had to be prepared to try to negotiate my discomfort in Hunchy or risk missing what could be learned about working with and through the ‘unknowns, surprises, and uncertainties’ of journeys. In this way and as preparations for my travel became drawn out, I began delving Hunchy’s history. Unlike Canberra, Hunchy seemed amorphous and too difficult to pin down. There seemed to be plenty of accounts concerning settlers and their experiences with establishing communities and farms, but I could find little voicing the perspectives of the indigenous people of the area. Accounts of what happened for indigenous people during settlement were I found also often contested. An example was settlement and damming of the Baroon Basin, today Lake Baroon. Flooding the basin had required moving of the Kabi Kabi and Jinibara people who lived in its valley. One account had the removal as occurring through the murder of these communities via gifts of flour poisoned with strychnine. Relaying this story to an academic at Sunshine Coast University I was told however that the story was a flagrant creation. After several similar experiences with trying to grasp settlement and history I became confused and uncomfortable to the point that I ceased trying to establish credibility of accounts, though I continued reading them. 1

Steve Chaddock, “Captain Cook: The Glass House Mountains,” in Earth, Dreams, Magic: A Journey through the Blackall Range Region, ed. Elaine Green and Michael Berry (Maleny: Hinterland Business Center, 2010). 26.

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“Robert Laverick left his butchering business in Durham in England, with his wife Ruth née Stolbert and son James, and sailed on the ship “Ruttle Bay”, arriving in Brisbane on 4th August 187….After ten years Robert selected a block of land in ‘Baroon Pocket’ in the Maleny district. They journeyed from Brisbane to Maroochydore by ship, and from there to Maleny by bullock wagon. In the year 1886, they moved onto their selection and formed their homestead there in dense scrub with no others settlers near. Robert and James sought work, while Ruth and Lilly remained on the selection. Visits by aboriginals were frequent but no molestation ever took place. They came to beg for food…they were always friendly and always moved on. Whilst Ruth was living in Baroon Pocket, for one period of two years she never saw another white woman.”2 The story of the Laverick family, one of many describing early white settlement of the Hinterland, disturbed me. What became of these people who, “came to beg for food…were always friendly and always moved on”? At some point I decided that Hunchy could not be explained to me through its literature and that painting in this place was never going to be about locating certainty but about touching it through many senses.

Marbling in a Garage: Unorthodox Spaces of Making Painting in Hunchy began practically with preparing a new scroll. Unlike a conventional painting, the reverse side of a scroll is of visual significance as it receives attention through being rolled and unrolled. Halfway through the year in Canberra I had discovered a way of negotiating this through the use of marbling. Known in Persian as ebru meaning “cloud art”, marbling developed in Iran during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. My first encounter with marbling was in the inner leaves of vintage books. Later I saw it in the decorative borders of ancient Persian illuminated manuscripts, and then at the NCA where I admired the use of it in works by Pakistani miniature painter and one of my teachers, Naheed Fakhar.

2

Warren Gillie and Cate Patterson, “The First Settlers of Baroon Pocket,” (Montville Historical Group: Montville History Group, 2016).

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Naheed Fakhar, Zal and Rodebeh. Detail. Image courtesy of the artist

Initial experiments with marbling in Canberra had taught me something of the process namely that it was a difficult one to control. Marbling was therefore something to be undertaken as part of preparing the scroll as otherwise the risk of covering existing paintings was great. Practically in this way marbling was helpful because it suggested the placement of paintings on the scroll through the markings that the paint created on the upper side. In Canberra I had tried traditional marbling recipes that used ingredients such as agar agar, cornflour, and carrageen to thicken the water. But I failed to achieve the consistency required to allow the paint to float and perform its swirling aesthetic. Luckily I was able to seek the advice of miniature painter Nida Bangash who at the time was artist in residence in the painting workshop at the School of Art. Nida showed me how she created her marbling using oil paint thinned with turpentine dropped onto water. Though oil was a medium I wanted to leave, the effects Nida was able to create using oil were so marvellous that I gave in and adopted her recipe.

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Marbling on the reverse side of Australind

I had no studio at my parent’s place and so I improvised in their garage. This was crammed with farm equipment, old furniture, and other paraphernalia. My marbling experiments in Hunchy were thus an opportunity to explore technique in context of one of the challenges of peripatetic art practice which is that of working in improvised, and temporary spaces. Here, making do by using garage equipment was in part preparation for unorthodox places of making further on. On a table I placed a large tray containing an inch of water. I created my palette by looking out at the surrounding garden and drawing on the vibrant floral hues, emeralds and viridians that formed the summer colours of Hunchy. I thinned the oil paints with turpentine, and carefully pouring drops of colour onto the water, swirled them using a length of wire. Traditionally paper is marbled in small sheets, however as part of planning for an extended field trip I used the entire ten-metre ream of paper for my scroll. This made marbling challenging, exciting, and at times quite frenzied. I held the loosely rolled paper in one hand, using the other to dip it foot by foot onto the water. Every few feet the paper needed to be hung to dry and the objects at hand became drying racks. I hung the marbled loops over a lawnmower, old chairs, a wheelbarrow, a garden rake, a clothes hanger and whatever else came to hand until the trail of paper extended beyond the garage and along the driveway. The weather was very warm and still, which was fortunate as a breeze could have ripped the wet, fragile paper, or blown

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the roll out to sea. In the humid air the paper dried slowly whilst at the table I kept marbling. Every half meter required a new lot of paint, a swirl of the colour, and another round of dipping. As the length increased I would put down the roll, dry my hands, run out and shift the paper loops along the ‘racks’ until the entire length had been marbled. The process including drying, took about five hours. The marbling produced colourful whirls in which the blues and greens conveyed a terrestrial feel. Throughout the scroll the marbling had generated many incidental marks, which as I encountered them, suggested ideas for paintings. The marbling had roiled over to the reverse side, generating mountain-like effects that reminded me of the volcanic intrusions dotting the Hinterland, while other drooping marks suggested the heavy summer rain clouds at that time of year. These marks all spoke to me of my immediate environment and helped me to view this this new scroll as reflective of Hunchy. Marbling as a process effectively grounded me in a place which otherwise I had struggled to connect with. It was interesting to me how this intuitive process with colour had provided a means of connecting to the environment thus opening the way to further painting. From this point on marbling therefore became a useful method to which I returned for an embodied flow of response to location, and whenever I needed to prepare a new scroll.

Hunchy Holding Its Breath Marbling had immersed me in the landscape as I recreated its colours and this encouraged me to come to ground and think about the farm as the logical first stage of my journey. I pondered my ambivalence about painting, acknowledging that peripatetic practice can take the painter to places that may feel uncomfortable due to present/historical factors and where a way of working needs to be found. In Hunchy I realised here was an opportunity to explore my reluctance to learn about its history. I sensed that this meant painting a land with divergent and conflicting histories such as a history of violent colonisation and environmental damage, a previous history involving indigenous occupation, and other histories unknown to me, and doing so not by means of intellectual research, but by physically setting out to hear what it could tell me. I cultivated a hands-on relationship with the land by roaming around the farm, sitting under trees, and listening to the goings on. I carried a sound recorder and captured the calls of birds, frogs, crickets, and cows at dawn, dusk, different times of day and night. I tried to capture the diverse sounds of rain, wind, and storms. I also recorded conversations with local people, some of whom had grown up in the area and who had seen it change over decades.

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Listening and recording I became aware of communities of native Noisy Miner birds competing for nesting space with Indian Mynahs. One day a particularly intense fight prompted ideas for a stream of imagery in the scroll and a story about a Noisy Miner nestling, a character I called “Mina”. In the character of Mina I saw possibilities, a point of entry to talking about cultural disjuncture and displacement. As a process this showed me how experiential and embodied methods such as walking, listening, and being with a place could yield material for a storyteller wishing to story the life of animal and other non-human communities.

Mina’s story. Australind. Detail

Walking in Hunchy made a collector of me. I picked up and carried home flowers, seeds, stones, the shed skins of snakes and other material such that soon every surface in my room was covered. After rain new things would appear—a community of fleshy lavender-hued mushrooms, a tribe of emerald frogs in an overflowing pot. When a large ripe Bunya cone nearly fell on my head it stimulated further research of the area’s indigenous history, and a painting of the cone which I brought back to the house. I learnt that the Bunya trees in our area are the remnants of once-great forests, and that my parent’s farm had lain on the pathway of the Great Bunya Feast, a ritual gathering to which would come Indigenous people from throughout southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales. In an account of settlement by Beverley Hand, I read, “when Indigenous people saw their huge trees that they had nurtured

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from juveniles being felled, they began to cry. Not only did their cries last for days but they could be heard for miles.”3 Above Hunchy, in the Blackall Range, I went walking in Kondalilla reserve near Lake Baroon. Unlike the rest of the Blackall Range the Kondalillla forests escaped extreme clearing through the enlightened actions of Governor Gipps who recognised their importance to the survival of the indigenous people. Unfortunately, from 1860 logging resumed although in 1906 the reserve was declared again and gradually able to be extended and linked to nearby small remaining reserves. Today the approximately 1600 hectares of Kondalilla still hold incredible diversity in terms of native plants, flowers, trees, mosses, funghi and lichen forming a sanctuary for a great many now-endangered animals who are sustained in its unfolding valleys. Canopied with trees of monumental proportions, each valley with its tapestry of scents and noises is bound in what feels to me like an immense blanket of peace and quietude. In comparison to Kondallila I found Hunchy, which had not escaped clearing, now resembled a shadowland. I learned that though there had been settlers who did not want to do the backbreaking work of clearing the land, government policy had demanded that they do so or lose their selection. Most farmers had complied, leaving stands of remaining forest in steeper places, and the odd large tree near their homesteads. I found these remnants poignant. I also found my attention caught by faint large, rounded depressions in the grass that somehow suggested places where very large trees had once stood. I found myself gazing at singular immense Port Jackson figs, and remaining thickets of Bunya pine. I watched the next-door neighbour’s cows vacuuming up the rich green grass and was reminded of Lin Onus’s painting Ground Lice in which he depicted sheep attached to the land like parasites. It was a disquieting image.4 Greened by the rain, stippled with shafts of golden light, the outward beauty of Hunchy conflicted with my feelings of it being haunted. Sometimes looking at the valley I had a sense of a place suspended, as if it were holding its breath. Suspended also were the stories of the people who called this land ‘home’ now, and in the past. The indigenous people, the first to be pushed to the margins, and now the old people like my parents who had retired in Hunchy to wait out life; these flowed into my sense of the place and the paintings that I ultimately developed.

3

Beverly Hand, “Beverley’s Story,” in Earth, Dreams, Magic: A Journey through the Blackall Range Region, ed. Elaine Green (ed) and Michael Berry (ed. consultant) (Maleny: Hinterland Business Center, 2010). 126; Chaddock, “Captain Cook: The Glass House Mountains.”. 4 Lin Onus, Ground Lice, 1990. synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 2154×1068cm. Craftsman House in association with the Queensland Art Gallery.

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Hunchy Holding its Breath, Australind. Detail

According to the indigenous artist, curator and anthropologist Gary Lee, the landscape tradition of painting in Australia has been about theft of Indigenous land, by serving as “an artistic representation of, and cultural justification for the process of colonialism”. But Vida Brown who had introduced to me the idea of the travelling storyteller, had perceived in my activities of making paintings in her country another and much older paradigm. Was it the manner of representation of the land in painting that mattered, or was it the sense of awareness that accompanied an act of painting?. Might there be a way of making pictures of and about land that spoke of being with rather than appropriating it? At ANU I had met the artist Jennifer Taylor whose paintings made in Northern Territory offered a way of depicting country that did not ignore but embodied awareness of troubling realities concerning land and appropriation. Taylor achieved this through her engagement with indigenous people in the regions where she painted, and by taking on Arrernte elder Margaret Kemarre Turner’s alternate idea of ‘beautiness’ in the land. Beautiness in this sense meant that even blasted, mined, and stripped of its living features, the land was still something to remain connected to and cared for. Taylor thus found herself able to focus her painting practice on immersion and encounter, looking for an experience of interconnection and relatedness with land, rather than its idealisation. For her this was about seeing and showing something less obvious than visible beauty, and to involve “pathos and a sense of responsibility for country” in her painting.5

5

Jennifer Taylor, “Portraits of Country: A Plein Air Painter in Arrernte Country” (Phd, Practice led research, Charles Darwin University, 2014), 79, 80.; ibid., 72.

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My problem was that between Hunchy’s aesthetic beauty and sense of it being haunted I struggled with finding the ‘beautiness’. Though I was interested in and spent time listening to the feelings and thoughts of descendants of settler families still living Hunchy, I yearned to hear also those of people whose relationships with Hunchy might pre-date that of the settlers. Unfortunately, I was not able to connect with people of Indigenous ancestry which meant that senses of loss and of absence preoccupied me as I continued painting in Hunchy, and ultimately these senses also permeated the work.

Light into Painting

Port Jackson Fig. Detail. Australind. Note the use of pale yellow base washes on which the painting is built, and which help to create effects of light

Different to my process in Canberra, life drawing, not the kind involving a model and a studio but actual drawing from the life surrounding, was a technique I found myself using consistently in Hunchy. Perhaps this was an outcome of living on the farm where the immediacy of the land and its features seemed to ask for more direct engagement. Early paintings in Hunchy thus involved sketching from vantage points as I sought to create my view of the valley.

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The way that I created the first painting of Hunchy in the Australind scroll happened as I sat on my parents veranda. I looked out over the valley, my eye taking a relaxed but interrogative approach in which the drawing evolved “composed of traces of the artists’ gaze left behind as lines on the paper”. Working my peripheral vision I added information—the rolling coastline and features that caught my eye: a huge solitary Port Jackson fig, a windmill, a pond. John Berger beautifully describes this process as, “a kind of optical emigration by which the artist, following his own gaze settles on the person or tree or animal or mountain being drawn and if the drawing succeeds, he stays there forever.”6 Having sketched this scene, the light of that rain-washed summer day in the late afternoon became something else to which I found myself responding and wanting to remember. Finishing my pencil sketch, I brought out my watercolour box with its forty odd tiny pans of pigment, and a couple of jam jar lids. In the lids I mixed up shades of a lemony wash which I poured over the pencil-sketches and brushed into areas using a soft inch-wide brush. My purpose with these was to create a base of light bright colour, thus building ideas of Hinterland sunlight into the painting. Along the horizon out to sea the setting sun was flooding the sky with hues of dusty pink, tangerine, and peach. With the lemon base still damp, I mixed more translucent washes of orange and carmine. Using a smaller brush I ran lines of colour along the horizon of my scene which I then sprayed with water. The spray encouraged the paint to bleed, billow, and pool, after which I left it to dry. When dry the marks were pale and cloudlike. The translucence of the wash allowed the pencil drawings to show through, telling me where to work later. My processes with base painting drew on English traditions of plein air and in-situ watercolour painting.7 Watercolour or ‘body colour’ as it was then known became the preferred medium for the genre of European travel painting that developed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The use of watercolour to put down scenes directly while in situ was innovated by Eugene Delacroix who instead of pencil, would dampen his brush with enough watercolour to directly ‘sketch out’ people and scenes. Working with rather than against the dynamic tendency of the watercolour to bleed was how Delacroix was able to use those initial ‘sketches’ to build up paintings that retained the dynamic life and immediacy of the original subject. The results that he was able to achieve influenced many English painters for whom the watercolour sketch subsequently became a popular method, particularly for gathering information which could be put to use later on for creating more elaborate works in oil.8

6

John Berger, John Berger: Selected Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 561. En plein air refers to a way of painting in which the entire process takes place out of doors. 8 Graham Reynolds, A Concise History of Watercolours (London, Great Britain: Thames and Hudson, 1971). 131. 7

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Watercolour techniques were used by artists travelling on the Indian subcontinent one of whom was Scottish painter William Simpson. Simpson grew up in the slums of Glasgow and as a painter was self-taught, meaning that he learned to look closely at what other artists were doing and to recreate their effects through practise. When working to commission, he would create watercolour studies as part of researching his subject, drawing on these later to create oil paintings. But the studies themselves are to me very beautiful—full of life and evincing Simpson’s special ability to perceive and empathise with Indian subjects. It was as much this quality as it was his techniques with painting that fascinated me, and that came to influence my process in ways I discuss in more detail in this chapter, when I left Australia for India.9

Portraying the ‘Imaginal World’ One afternoon in Hunchy the valley was still, without a breath of wind. I was vividly reminded of those Persian miniature paintings in which are revealed each leaf and each blade of grass. Such paintings utilise flat perspectives and the unitary rendering of minute details to invoke an alternate space that Muslim philosophers have called the alam-al-khayal. This is an intermediate reality between the archetypal world and the physical reality, associated with the inner experience of the archetypal world of forms. According to Islamic art scholar Seyyad Hossein Nasr, “by remaining on another plane, and yet possessing a life and movement of its own, the miniature is able to have a contemplative dimension and to create an aspect of joy […] which is an echo of the joy of paradise.”10 Unlike a plein air painter who might put down their subject almost entirely in situ, there would come a stage at which I needed to retreat to a space of introspection. Similar to my process in Canberra with rendering the foreshore, I took myself away from the scene to allow room for inner responses. I imagined the fig trees that perhaps once dominated the landscape and painted them in as negative spaces. I imagined human bones beneath the soil and painted them alongside poisonous Datura or “Angels Trumpet” that grows in our area. I unified these forms with the Yirrkala rarrk motif that I had begun using in Canberra in the painting of Mr Hungy as a way to suggest a pervading Aboriginal presence, and connections to the land stretching back in history.11

9

Ibid. P 133; Oil paintings of the eighteenth century were yet to utilise the spontaneity of plein air painting and as such were more challenging to create in terms of the time and the more controlled conditions of a studio that this required. 10 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Art and Spirituality (Pakistan: Suhail Academy Lahore, 1997), 78, 82.; ibid., 182. 11 Eun Byul Go, “Seeds” (Masters of Fine Arts, Kent State University, 2014). 4.

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Within the painting I also rendered forms unitarily as is a feature of miniature paintings, by depicting flowers with individual petals, singular blades of grass, and individual leaves of trees. My intention here was partly to evoke ideas of the ‘imaginal world’ depicted within miniature paintings, and partly as a strategy to slow the viewer’s gaze. By encouraging the eye to drift from form to form, I hoped to draw them into an experience of the imaginal world, by allowing them to contemplate the idea of Hunchy suspended in time.

Unknown artist, Esfandyar killing the dragon. Detail. Example of unitary rendering of leaves

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Insights into Planning and Packing

Packing. Australind. Detail

In Hunchy I began planning my upcoming journey to India. Tasks such as obtaining visas found me running around and navigating loops of bureaucracy, whilst the packing of bags became a physical and psychological exercise so involving that I painted about it. These activities gave me an early taste of how the ordinary/practical concerns of life in context of travel could easily become material for paintings. Working with a nomadic art practice asks for travelling light. But as I began preparing for a year in the field I began to have anxieties and dilemmas about what to take. That which I wanted to have with me conflicted with what I would be able to physically manage and carry, and packing was compounded by my sense of anxiety about this journey, which for me felt like an immense undertaking. Such anxiety made the work of packing challenging. As I sought to differentiate between the things that I felt I needed in order to be ‘prepared for anything’ versus the things that were essential to my research, whilst keeping the size and weight of my baggage manageable, exploring ways of achieving this made packing something of an obsession. Over two months I must have packed, unpacked, and repacked my bags at least a hundred times, often overcome by the seeming impossibility of this task. As I asked myself repeatedly what I really needed to take, and what could I do without, I began to realise that many things that I had thought essential were in fact more security blankets. I saw that in my anxiety about being prepared for life in the nomadic, certain items or objects had taken on additional meanings, so that they represented more than tools, but evoked senses and sometimes memories of security. I found myself wondering what it must have meant for my parents and grandparents to live through experiences of upheaval, displacement, and migration, during which

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they lost or had to leave behind most of their material possessions. I realised that in a deeper way nomadic art practice was calling me to rethink the meanings I had given to material things, as well as collective memories of the nomadic in my family. With thinking about this, I found myself better placed to stand back and rethink packing in a different light. In the painting I made about packing I found myself releasing my anxieties in tiny drawings. I painted things I knew I needed to take, and when at times I found myself drawing an article and pausing halfway, it was with the realisation that this might be something I could do without. Painting in this way was like meditating on a problem, epiphanic in its own way, and helpful in allowing me to visually list and distinguish the essential tool from the security blanket. I was able to consider for example that which I needed to obtain before I travelled, and that which could be obtained inexpensively along the way. As an example, I culled almost all the clothing I had initially thought I could not do without to those which I wore. I also found myself leaving out things such as toiletries, towel, bedding, and a host of other things that I realised could be found locally and cheaply in country and along the way. Almost all the books I thought I needed with me were, I realised in time, not essential to my research. Rather they were like old friends who I wanted with me, whereupon I told myself that my task as a storyteller might be to make new ones. Of the research materials that I took, those for my art practice weighed the least and took the least amount of space. There is something to be said for the feeling of freedom that comes when as an artist that you realise that you can make your work with the contents of a small backpack, the highest echelon of artists being those who work only with what they find on-site and locally. The need to document my practice however introduced weight in the form of camera equipment, laptop, and hard drives. The camera that I chose was heavy by normal standards, however I considered this essential in that it would allow me to create high-definition films of field work, and of people who I worked with. Another incentive to keep my baggage smaller and lighter was the fact that I intended travelling as much as possible using public transport systems. Although peons are often available for hire at most of the railway and bus stations, on a tight budget I was determined to manage my luggage myself. Thinking of the oftencrowded nature of these transport systems saw me decide to carry two medium sized backpacks rather than a single large one as two packs worn back and front allowed

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for greater mobility. The lighter one held the scroll, hard drives, laptop, and camera— things that would be difficult to replace, and I kept this attached to my body. I had a sense that I might find myself glad to have adopted this strategy as in the past there had been times whilst travelling that I had fallen asleep on trains or platforms, times during which I had been prone to losing my bags.

From Hunchy to New Delhi

Green line showing the path that fieldwork took in India and Pakistan

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In April 2013 I left Hunchy for New Delhi in India carrying with me the scroll painting begun in Hunchy, which I called Australind. Though crossing from Canberra to Hunchy had brought dramatic changes in environment, these faded in comparison to those of crossing to India. The airport holds familiar smells of spices, incense, the faint waft of drains, the ubiquitous phenyl floor cleaner. My carefully packed sixteen kilos of luggage already feels too heavy as I slouch towards the Delhi metro which had been operational for a year. Still unaccustomed to large crowds, I pause at one point at the foot of a flight of stairs paralysed by the sight of people pouring down toward me. As if by magic they part and fly past, to pack the waiting train which begins moving on before I can board. From Delhi I headed out to its satellite city Gurgaon, where I planned to stay for some weeks with artist and miniature painter Anindita Bhattacharya. Anindita had studied at Baroda where encounters with her practice had inspired my own interest to train in the genre. Five years later Anindita’s practice had continued to develop in sophisticated ways due to her dedication with techniques she was using of papercut and patterning. Unlike many Indian artists of her generation she had also chosen to continue creating work by her own hand. In a society flooded with cheap available labour and low-cost methods of mass production such as printing and laser-cutting, the directions Anindita had chosen to take concerning painting distinguished her an artist. It was warm in Gurgaon and after a day or two of acclimatising in the seventh story apartment where lived Anindita, her husband, their two dogs and on certain days of the week their maid, I ventured out to Delhi with my scroll. I was keen to begin exploring painting in places where had worked the Scottish artist William Simpson. The first place I journeyed to would have taken Simpson in his time perhaps a day or two to reach on mule, but on the Metro it was about an hour and half before I arrived at Chandni Chawk or ‘Moonlight Crossing’, an ancient marketplace in Old Delhi.

Touching the Past Touching the historical practice of another artist is a strategy often used by artists seeking to ground their work in a particular context, culture, or practical tradition. In Canberra I had become interested to explore anchoring myself this way during travel in India and Pakistan. The idea found me looking at what had happened for painting which developed significantly with the rise of western colonial powers such as the English East India Company. Although the Company would in time outsource the work of creating visual records of in-country ‘assets’—environment, peoples, animals, and cultures to native artists, early on English painters were used. This

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was how I discovered the paintings and published sketchbooks of Scottish painter William Simpson (1823–1899). When Simpson came to India, the English East India Company had by this time been absorbed by the British Crown. As a painter Simpson caught my interest because of his background, having grown up in the slums of Glasgow and been self-taught, and because of his work as an illustrative journalist for the London News. He had become known for his immersive strategies and risk-taking methods to create visual accounts of battle, gaining particular acknowledgement for his visual documentation of the Crimean War. This had won him the commission from Queen Victoria to record the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the royal tour of India. In Simpson’s time the genre of travel painting was flowering, and many artists were painting about the Indian subcontinent. Simpson’s paintings distinguished themselves for me with their qualities of warmth, light and movement. His sketches and journal writings revealed someone with a genuine interest in people, a humanist working with an awareness of the colonial impact and of the contradictions he was navigating as an official artist for the Raj. Simpson’s paintings testify not only to life in that time but to a particular way of looking. This encompassed an inner struggle about which he wrote, as he sought to service his official commission whilst documenting Indian people and the fragility of their culture under the Raj. I was also drawn to Simpson for like him, I had a fascination for ancient technology and for traditional ways of doing and making things. Simpson offered me an example of an artist using his painting as a means by which to learn about and attend to technologies and methods that he sensed were in danger of being lost under the Raj. Reading his accounts, I was reminded of how often in India I had stood mesmerised by the design of an ancient machine still functioning and in use, or by the ways in which I saw people making all kinds of products. From food to textiles, to buildings, many methods and technologies, in some cases thousands of years old were as I saw it, continuing to offer simple, cost effective, and importantly ecological ways of doing and making. Simpson’s life drawings and plein air watercolour paintings offered me, as a painter, examples of ways of capturing life, environments, and atmospheres of India and Pakistan even as his journeys suggested a way for me to contemplate and touch the past, by visiting and sketching in places featured in his ‘India’ albums.12 In Delhi, Simpson had made sketches of Chandni Chawk or Moonlight Bazaar. His drawings, created over one hundred and sixty years ago, depict wide streets lined with trees. He liked to sketch the many small workshops in which sat craftspeople and artisans working at their looms or other equipment. In preparation for my excursion to Chandni Chawk I had spent time looking at Simpson’s sketches and researching the history of the bazaar where I thought I might find architectural remnants dating to the colonial era and earlier. I also sat and went over my memories of having visited it as a tourist some years previously. But of course, nothing could prepare me for the 12

Archer and Theroux, Visions of India. 7, 8.

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highly congested and polluted district Chandni Chawk had become in 2012, and for which my task became addressing its realities through painting.

Mediating Chaos: Drawing and Film

Chandni Chawk, Old Delhi. Still from field documentary. 2013

The online version of this chaptercontains the field film Chandni Chawk available to authorised users. (Link) As the first of many chaotic spaces that I sought to engage with through painting, Chandni Chawk presented opportunities and challenges that I frequently encountered later in cities of the Indian subcontinent. I came to think of my experiences there as offering a general perspective on all that could go on when as a painter I entered and negotiated such spaces. The atmosphere of Chandni Chawk is banded with tangerine. Pollution lazes along the ground. From the moment I leave the train I am pressed in on all sides by people. Sometimes men squeeze through and try to sell me things. They follow, unable give up, with eyes that are expressionless and reddened with something they’ve smoked or chewed.

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Outside the station I entered a labyrinth of interconnected bazaars. Though it was winter, the heat emitted by air conditioners, generators, and the crowds of people made the temperature in the narrow lanes summery. Sweat dripped off me as my ears rang from the din of the machines. The tight crowds and lack of space discouraged me from unpacking my camera but above I spied the balcony of an upstairs restaurant. I found its narrow stair and pulled myself up, whereupon I asked one of the staff if I might sit on the little balcony. Through its railings I panned over the crowds. My lens lit on a young man gathering rubbish and I followed him till he disappeared from view. I folded my tripod and squeezed back down the stairs but the lane was too full of people shopping for me to enter. Waiters trekked up and down the stairs, springing over me, masterfully balancing trays of masala chicken and parathas. I sank down and trained the camera on the flow of feet below me and observed a ten-rupee note being dropped, to be quickly picked up by someone walking close behind.

Street cleaner in Chandni Chawk. Detail. Australind

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In Chandni Chawk where I found the fullness and complexity of information overwhelming, the camera offered a way of negotiating the challenges of this chaotic space, helping me to negotiate the bazaar and to discover the street cleaner. In the street cleaner I saw someone quietly working at the margins, performing a task vital to society yet stigmatised in a culture where one is often defined by one’s work. Although I was not able to sketch him from life, re-observing the film allowed me to establish his figure in the scroll.

Chandni Chawk. Australind. Detail

Sometime later, still in Chandni Chawk, I was wandering in the bazaar looking for a place to rest. I sank down on the step of a jewellery shop in front of a small Hindu shrine and hoped I would not be asked to move. Devotions were being conducted and prayers were blasting through a set of enormous broken speakers. Parked beside the shrine in harness waited a bullock, head down, patient and seemingly oblivious to the traffic and crowds surging round him. I noticed the grey pollution banded with

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orange. I would have liked to draw the scene but there was too much movement. I couldn’t make out the architecture of the shrine for people coming and going. I sat back, searching for a way to engage with that before me and found it in the stillness of the bullock. I set up my camera, taking the opportunity to record myself engaging in this process. The film describes these fairly typical conditions of sketching on busy streets. I sit, working directly into scroll on my lap, dealing with common challenges such as trying to complete a drawing before a subject moves on, or having my view of a subject disrupted by passers-by, or having to move in order to allow someone to enter or leave the shop, the entry to which I am blocking, in addition to trying to wipe the sweat that rolls down my arms and onto the scroll.

A Carved Door in Old Delhi: Traces of the Colonial Past The field film Chandni Chawk contains footage of a set of antique doors with intricate carvings. I encountered this door wandering in the bazaar, where it was set into a period building caged in scaffolding and draped with tarpaulins. The antique door of perhaps rose or cherry wood called to my mind a conversation I had once had with a friend in Baroda about deforestation in his home state. I had asked him why there were no trees and he had told me that it had not always been so. The people of his village in Gujerat had ancestral memories of huge cherry forests existing before the time of the Raj. The forests had been important sources of food and medicines, as well as significant places of worship.13 But from the eighteenth century onward the East India Company heavily logged old-growth forests into disappearance, to supply industries of furniture production, charcoal smelting and development of the railroads.14

13

Michal Glikson, conversation with Yogesh Mahida, (Baroda, 2009). Somnath Ghosal, “Pre-Colonial and Colonial Forest Culture in the Presidency of Bengal,” Human Geographies: Journal of Studies and Research in Human Geography, no. 5.1 (2011): 107.

14

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In a situation such as this, sitting down to sketch the carvings that evoked for me legacies of India’s colonial past and the fate of its forests became about using drawing as a form of witnessing and of remembrance. The act of drawing engaged me with the life of the doors on multiple levels that were emotional, physical, and mental. As a way of being with a subject this tied in with the idea of practice-led research whereby practical investigation is not only about delving into the physical qualities of the object, such as to better understand the delicacy of the carvings, but also to meditate on and give meaning to my encounter with them in context of larger narratives of Indian history, as well as the one that was developing in the scroll.

Door carvings, Old Delhi. Australind. Detail

Meeting Atul

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Meeting Atul

Atul. Australind. Detail

While sitting at the shrine in Chandni Chawk my eye was caught by the sight of a slight young man moving along the street using his arms and hands to drag his body along the ground. I watched him, mesmerised. As he disappeared in the crowd I snapped to attention, stuffed my scroll and camera in my pack, and obeyed my impulse to follow him. He was on his way somewhere but stopped when he saw me and when I showed him my scroll graciously agreed to be sketched. He told me his name was Atul. People had been stepping over him without regard as I walked up. Perhaps they’d been doing so all his life. But there was not a trace of bitterness in his expression as he looked at them. Tapping him on the shoulder I introduced myself and learned that his name was Atul. I showed him the scroll and asked if I could draw his portrait. He agreed and, with nowhere to sit, we huddled on the footpath, people stepping over us.

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At first I sketched hurriedly, anxious to establish the portrait. When John Berger talks about “drawing as discovery” he hints at an experience of transcendence of self, where the process of following the logic of line immerses you in your subject until “the contours you have drawn no longer [mark] the edge of what you have seen, but the edge of what you have become”.15 This happened for me as I immersed in the making of the drawing. Perhaps also, as Berger puts it, through this process of looking and being with someone through drawing, I was learning to be embedded in life and becoming real in that moment, because it seemed that the chaos of the street faded away, replaced by details of Atul’s expression and appearance which imprinted on my mind. His immaculately combed hair and beard, his shirt, tattered from contact with the ground but with a beautifully pressed collar, spoke of someone who had taken pains to present himself gracefully to the world. The drawing completed, I thanked Atul. I offered him money, which he accepted, and we went our separate ways. But he remained on my mind.16 In India as in Canberra, much of my material arrived through chance encounters for which conditions served to heighten the impact these made upon me. Emerging unexpectedly out of the chaotic and otherwise anonymous crowd such encounters were for me significant and I felt a sense of serendipity about them. In these moments of recognition the details of a subject would be emphasised. They would begin to take on mythic proportions and Atul was a key example. He stayed on my mind long after I had finished sketching and we had parted ways. Perhaps in focusing my attention on my subject I had temporarily blurred the boundaries between subject and self, as Berger suggests, and in so doing connected with Atul on some deeper and empathic level. But something else had taken place while I was drawing which I can only describe as a sense of recognition, and this contributed to my motivations to continue work on his portrait over the following months.17

15

John Berger, Berger on Drawing (Aghabullogue, Co Cork, Ireland: Occasional Press, 2005). John Berger’s Political Way of Seeing, podcast audio, The Book Show, 37 minutes 2007, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/john-bergers-political-way-of-see ing/3236058. 17 M. Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (University of Washington Press, 1971), 18. 16

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Miniature Techniques and Nomadic Painting Atul had made an abiding impression on me and my challenge became finding a way to negotiate this experience through painting. Developing Atul’s image, I explored the miniature technique pardakht, thinking to exploit its optical aesthetic and give the portrait depth and mystique. Pardakht, which involves creating layers of tiny brush marks using watercolour of a dilute density is a highly repetitive process. Making pardakht was calming and meditative, deepening my engagement with the painting which had the added advantage of allowing me to reflect upon my subject with whom I felt connected. As fieldwork continued I discovered how a disciplined engagement with miniature and the calm elicited through making pardakht helped me sustain focus with painting even as I worked in transient, uncertain, and makeshift conditions.18 I was also curious about pardakt and its relationship with the spiritual context of miniature. Later during my travels and whilst in Lahore, I discussed this with Naheed Fakhar, miniature painter and teacher at Lahore National College of Art. Naheeed describes her art practice as strongly underpinned by spirituality, linking the meditative state she experiences while making pardakht to her devotional practice and suggests that its power to introduce meditation into the painting process lies in the repetitive action of its making. For her this action mirrors Islamic prayer during which the name of God is repeated. Pardakht in this way is akin to prayer by creating a flow of focus through which one “goes into the miniature”. This helped me to understand the reciprocity I felt working with pardakht whereby making was soothing, motivating me to keep working with it and promoting my deeper engagement with painting.19 M. Glikson: What part of making a painting do you enjoy most? Ms. Fakhar: I enjoy when I focus on the dots, the pardakt. In Islam we have a practice of repetition of words like Allah, Allah, Allah – this is very meditative. It comes from your heart, repeatedly. Pardakt is like this repetition of small strokes. You do it repeatedly and you focus and you go into the miniature. That is what I feel for the miniature. I can say only this. I love miniature. 18

Hammad Nasar, “The ‘Expanded Field’ of Contemporary Miniature,” Nafas Art Magazine (2010), http://u-in-u.com/nafas/articles/2010/contemporary-miniature/. 19 Michal Glikson, interview with Naheed Fakhar, (National Collage of Art, Lahore, March 2014).

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M. Glikson: Is pardakt the hardest part of miniature to learn? Ms Fakhar: Yes, it is very difficult to understand. It is not only the matter of the stroke it’s a matter of filling the blank areas, the paper areas. You have to control your hand, your eye, your mind. So when you can control or focus inside a point then you can do the pardakt. If you can’t control your water, your colour inside the brush then you can’t do the pardakt. You will make messy areas. So when I teach the student how to do the pardakt its very difficult to pour in their mind how to focus, they can draw well, they can do colour well, but when they start mixing and doing pardakt it is the most difficult thing in miniature…miniature is a thing that gives you peace, gives you satisfaction, and compose yourself also because you have to sit, for a long time, because you have to focus. All religion is focusing something, on God, especially on God. You have to focus on God. So miniature, pardakt is also the same thing, you have to focus.

Pardakht. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Views on Pardakht available to authorised users. (Link) In addition to the focus elicited through miniature painting techniques, I connected to the miniature with its senses of timidity and secrecy. Although I intended at some stage to be sharing my scrolls, the material they contained was often very personal and there were times when scale felt like a defensive strategy. Although I did not make copious notes in the scroll, I often accompanied visual entries with lines of text created using the qalam—the traditional miniature brush made from squirrel hair. I called this text ‘fairy writing’, and though I took pains to make this legible, I also

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enjoyed the sense of control that the scale of the writing afforded in that it ultimately challenged the naked eye.

Making fairy writing in the scroll. Film still

At one stage I filmed myself making fairy writing in the scroll, a process that had the effect of making me acknowledge the time this took to create. It was impractical, and I asked myself why I was not using a pencil or a pen and nib. It was only after rereading my notes throughout the scroll that I realised how, the difficulty of this way of writing not only kept me succinct and to point with what I sought to convey in text, it kept me returning to making images for which the brush was so much more suited. Once I had left Australia, access to a studio as well as a stable base disappeared. Questions of control became relevant across cultures in the absence of these structures, familiar ways of doing things, and familiar language. Miniature was not so much a way of rendering life as “… domesticated and protected from contamination” but it did offer a way of compensating for the sense of control which I lost in the process of becoming peripatetic.65 The disciplined focus required for miniature with its particular and precise kinds of technical processes, along with the scale that asked for steadiness, calmitude and quiet, gained importance as I travelled on. Miniature offered a counter to chaos, a ‘still point’ within the increasingly transitional and improvised contexts in which I found myself working. As a way of painting, making miniatures was thus psychologically supportive to sustaining art practice through travel.

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Empathy, “The Gift of an Attentive Life” “…the gift of an attentive life is the ability to recognise patterns and find our way toward a unity built on empathy. Empathy becomes the path that leads us from the margins to the centre of concern…”20 My encounter with Atul reconnected me with experiences I had had with portraiture in Kashmir whereby sketching became a way of forging a kind of bridge across selves. My ideas about the dynamic of portraiture were strongly guided by those of John Berger concerning drawing, which he believed offered a way of deeply perceiving and being with others. Berger’s own experience of attending to people and his observation of facial expressions was something about which he wrote whilst drawing in Palestine; “The expression in his eyes reminds me of an old woman I have seen the day before. An expression of great attention to the moment. Calm and considered, as if it could conceivably be the last moment…When it came to saying goodbye, the Aunt held my hand, and in her eyes, there was this same special expression of attention to the moment.”21 Berger’s experience of a ‘great attention to the moment’ reminded me of my encounter with Atul. This quality of attention was something I had seen in Atul’s eyes. Also on some level for me there had been a sense of recognition, perhaps of this expression. Thinking about this and wanting to know more about how the process of seeing, I found myself reading about the work of neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Glaser. Glaser correlates seeing with recognition, believing that seeing is an active process and somewhat radically, that what we see is matched by what we have learnt and encountered previously. Images of the world do not ‘come off it and into our eye’, but are shaped by our expectations, experiences and prejudices. This is the work of ‘mirror neurons’—neurons in the brain which developed as humans evolved socially through imitating each other. By enabling mimicry, the evolution of mirror neurones has allowed humans to learn from each other and in turn to develop in ways we recognize, which is how we bond together. Thus, the bond of recognition Glaser suggests, has had much to do with ensuring that we help each other and ultimately that we survive.22 The present perspective of visual neuroscience is that set up in specific brain centres are resonances with the familiar. Seeing movement or facial expressions that we ourselves recognise and can produce provides us with clues with which to extrapolate and construe the experience. At an essential level through looking we

20

Terry Tempest Williams, “Finding Beauty in a Broken World,” (Kirkus Media LLC, 2008). 385. John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007). 78, 79. 22 Daniel Glaser, “Monkey Do, Monkey See,” in Nova scienceNow, ed. Robert Krulwich (2005). http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/glaser-monkey.html; Suzi Gablik, “Connective Aesthetics,” Chicago Journals 6, no. No. 2 (Spring 1992), http://www.jstor.org/stable/3109088. 21

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mirror, and through mirroring we empathise. Empathising with others is how we bond—and again, how we survive.23 I pondered what I understood of Glaser’s research in context of my experience with Atul, wondering if his expression had in fact elicted in me some form of recognition— not of Atul personally but perhaps his bearing, and why was this so. In the world of Chandni Chawk whose inhabitants had stepped over him without a glance, Atul had gazed at them in a way that had fascinated and perplexed me, because it was compassionate, forgiving, and yet somehow so full of pain. He had not judged their treatment of him, nor taken it personally, whilst at some level he felt it. What was it in Atul’s expression that I recognised? Of this I am still not sure. Sometimes I wonder if this was a quality I had seen in great paintings of Christian saints. Other times I was reminded of the demeanor of certain mystics, holy people, llamas, or very kind, wise elders whom I had encountered in India, Pakistan, and Australia—people to whom others came for advice, counselling, healing, or perhaps to simply bathe in an aura of compassionate being.

Intangible Products, Connection, and Empathy Empathy correlates with the idea of a connective aesthetic of art—art that is rooted in a “listening self rather than a disembodied eye”. Connective aesthetics in art practice is relational and looks to an idea of the artist and their subject community as being interconnected and entwined. Acts that invoke empathy embody connective aesthetics, generating sensory fields that are intangible, subtle, and yet palpable and memorable. Such dynamics take shape or emerge in form of the connections or bonds forged between artist and subject, and other senses of relationship that acts of listening and being with others.24 I came to see moments of connection and empathy as intrinsic to I what I was doing with painting, if somewhat challenging to document. If my practice had a shape then it included these moments that emerged between people or other kinds of subjects, and myself. These moments were not paintings, but in their artless quality, I sensed them as having rasa, as intangible yet innately creative products.25 These creative products represented exchanges of time. I had come to think of time as a gift in light of the idea that none of us really knows how much time we have in this life. Whether moments, hours or days, the time that people gave to me, and that which I gave to them represented something that could not be compensated for in monetary terms, nor returned. With this in mind, the motivation to hone and 23

ibid., “Mirror Neurons”, 2005. Gablik, Suzi. “Connective Aesthetics.” Chicago Journals 6. No. 2 (Spring 1992): 2–7. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/3109088. 25 Baumer, Bettina, and Shimla Indian Institute of Advanced Study, India. “The Lord of the Heart: Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics and Kashmir Saivism.” Religion and the Arts 12 (2008): 214–29; The literal meaning of rasa in Hindi is juice. Rasa in aesthetic terms could be thought of as the ‘juice’ or essence of the art work, that which governs its potential to impact and move an audience. 24

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craft drawings into miniature paintings was great, as a means of mythologising and honouring these gifts of time.

Big Indian Wedding

Preparing for Big Indian Wedding. Detail. Australind

Spending time with people as a guest in their homes, I became participant and observer to life in their home and to the layers of their enclosed worlds. Within these worlds, my own life and whatever plans I had became shifting and peripheral. I learned something about this early on during a period of stay with the artist Anindita Bhattacharya. I had anticipated being able to observe her at work in her studio but instead what I ended up observing were the preparations taking place for her wedding or shahdi which she announced to me when I arrived. Her wedding was to be a traditional affair involving an elaborate and lavish series of events with a high level of planning involved. Though the event was eight months away, the bride to be, her husband, in-laws, friends, and employees were already engaged in a countdown of preparations to the final days. I became fascinated with these and with the bride herself as she immersed herself in a daily regime that began with lemon water and hours of exercise, followed by a seemingly endless series of tasks with organising the wedding events. I realised that for the time being observation of the artist’s practice

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would have to wait and excused myself, promising to return in time to film the marriage, as my wedding gift.

Bridging Realities and Bina

Bina. Australind. Detail

Anindita’ mother-in-law-to-be visited often, to talk and assist with planning for the wedding. Bina was the principal of a private school and her tiny, impeccably attired form personified authority. At times and as she talked, I found myself glancing from her to the window with its view of the gardens below and in which I could see the domestic servants and maids wandering back from the shop with their arms full of groceries or engaged in chores such as cleaning their employers’ cars, washing clothes, or ironing. Then I might feel Bina eyes upon me and come back to the room. There, the sight of her arranged on the sofa with her silk dupatta and imported designer handbag conjured impressions of an empress holding court. Such layered realities featuring Bina, the maids, and myself connected in those moments and became things that I sought to put down in my scroll, the better to contemplate and reflect on.

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Bulbuli’s Day: Storying the Extra/ordinary

Bulbuli’s day. Australind. Detail

As I watched preparations going on for the wedding, one person quietly went on cleaning, cooking, and caring for the household. This person was the family’s maid, fourteen-year-old Bulbuli. Unused to living in a household where there were maids, I was curious about Bulbuli and watched her as she worked, simultaneously central and peripheral to her employer’s lives. With Bulbuli’s permission I began sketching and filming her, often in the kitchen where she spent much of her day. Though more challenging to capture, her natural movements and the positions she took up through the day allowed me to convey the temporal, physical quality of her work.

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Bulbuli, initial sketch

Observing Bulibuli’s routines over time allowed me to bring in details such as the utensils she used, her actions with cutting vegetables, rolling dough, washing floors, as well as her daily hair decorations and dresses.

Bulbuli’s day. Still from field documentarys

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The online version of this chaptercontains the field film Bulbuli’s Day available to authorised users. (Link) Being with and painting about Bulbuli afforded me a window into the experience of being a full time maid in India. This prompted me to reflect on the vulnerable status of those who work as domestic employees for the middle and upper classes. On the dining table one day I found in the newspaper an article about the exploitation of maids and domestic employees. Though Bulbuli’s working conditions were fair in comparison, I brought in the clipping as collage to refer to the existence of problems of exploitation of this kind more generally.

Newspaper article used as collage for Bulbuli’s Day

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Kela Many of the people who came to work as service providers in Devindar Vihar and surrounding societies lived like Bulbuli, in illegal shanty towns. Walking, I found Bulbuli’s enclave one day, a cluster of small homes made of recycled bricks and other found materials, set on a large plot of as-yet undeveloped land. In its narrow, sunny lanes sows lay contentedly with their piglets, goats perched delicately on the spines of broken walls, and children played, running in and out of the open doors of the tiny homes. I looked down at my feet to find a small brightly painted clay elephant pressed into the earth. I hung over a wall and stared at the skyline of towers whilst a goat tried to chew my scroll and thought how much better it felt down here, after the hermetic high-rise apartment. Near a jhuggi made of corrugated iron sheets, stretched tarpaulins, and bamboo poles I met Bulbuli’s aunt, Kela. As Kela sat, surrounded by her grandchildren, I sketched her portrait.26 As my pencil made the the lines of her high-cheekboned face I pondered her indigo tattoos. Her hands were also tattooed with tiny indigo flowers. Such painted jewellery made me wonder if these were made on the hands of each generation of women in Kela’s family, denoting lineages of beauty and feminine power, or if they had been created on her for singular and special reasons. Without language, so much of my time with people was spent pondering such questions, for which observation and drawing became my way of putting these down. Video was becoming a source of continuing reflection. Editing the films Bulbuli’s Day and Bulbuli’s Jhuggi contributed to the development of these paintings after I left Gurgaon. As life, journey and painting kept rolling on and into one another, each full day encouraging forgetfulness of the one before, acts of re-observation through film were important, as they allowed me to travel back and reacquaint myself with their details.

26

Jhuggi is used to describe a makeshift home or tent in Hindi and Urdu. More detail about jhuggis can be found in Chapter Three.

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Kela. Detail/Australind

Bulbuli’s Community. Still from field documentary

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The online version of this chaptercontains the field film Bulbuli’s Community available to authorised users. (Link)

The Gardener of Gurgaon

Dheeraj the gardener of Gurgaon. Detail. Australind

I showed my scroll to Akash, a friend of Anindita’s and told him of my interest in stories happening on the margins, especially those that expressed senses of not/belonging. Akash told me he knew of a man who had become something of an urban legend in Gurgaon because of his activities with gardening on wasteland and empty plots, and offered to introduce me.

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We went and visited the man one evening. Dheeraj was small, dark with large, very green eyes, and absorbed with digging in a vegetable patch with his children. He told me that he owned an apartment close by which gave him some leeway with authorities when it came to cultivating nearby empty plots. He told me how he had first brought manure to revitalise the soil, and then set to planting the patches with vegetable seeds. Now he was harvesting enough tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and bitter gourd to feed his family of five and give to others. Though his plots were but temporary creations soon to be concreted, he believed that it was important to show his children where food came from and how to grow it. His eyes lit up when he talked about organic farming, and his memories of childhood in rural Punjab. As we said goodbye, Dheeraj loaded me with homegrown vegetables. On the way back to Devindar Vihar I wondered what Gurgaon might look like if others came down as Dheeraj did from the towers every evening to garden.

The Gardener of Gurgaon. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field film The Gardener of Gurgaon available to authorised users. (Link)

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Yogi Dreams of a Home

Yogi on his couch. Australind. Detail

In Baroda I stayed with my old friend Yogesh, a ceramicist and alumnus of the Baroda Art School. Whilst I was a student Yogi had taken on the role of being my brother, which meant that he had looked out for me, given me brotherly advice, cared for me when I was sick, tried to teach me to eat properly, cook proper Indian food, and care for my feet, and scolded me when I did or said stupid things, which was often in those days when I was new to Indian society and its complex etiquettes. In return for these gifts of support Yogi gained my respect and everlasting affection, and beaded bracelets on Rakshabandan—the festival of sibling love.

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Through his family and business connections Yogesh was acquainted with many of Baroda’s factories and their managers or owners. With his help we found a plastics factory where one of the designers expressed willingness to work with my idea for a scroll box. Within several weeks the design materialised and with care we packed the box to be shipped back to Australia. In the meantime I stayed with Yogi and got know how his life had been going, whilst also reacquainting myself with the life of Baroda. Yogesh normally juggled his career as a ceramicist and sculptor with work for his family’s business but this time I found him consumed with a different project that involved the building of a home about which he had been dreaming for many years. His little flat was bursting with things he had been collecting for the house. After a few days of sleeping wedged between statues and prickly piles of knickknacks, I offered to do some reorganising of things to create space in the flat. Being in a person’s place, alone with their things, especially when they are a collector, can offer a kind of material or aesthetic pathway to understanding something of them and their inner life. In the curious often intricate objects that Yogi had collected I percieved his tastes, but also aspects of his self. In the course of dusting, arranging, and putting away I pondered these, gaining a deeper understanding about my friend’s dream of a home. I had never thought of him as ‘unhomed’ because his family owned houses, and Yogi had his flat. But as I handled the objects, I gathered senses of how these had been collected over years. I realised that though I had often heard Yogi talk about this dream house, I myself had listened with only one ear. In a palpable way I began to understand how he too had been living between places, people, and desires. The yearning to be settled revealed itself slowly in these things which he obviously cared for, and planned to surround himself with someday in his home. As an experience this was revelatory, prompting a painting of him on his couch surrounded by his life, unfolding.

Navigating Culture: The Pot of Bad Luck

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Navigating Culture: The Pot of Bad Luck

The Pot of Bad Luck. Australind. Detail

One of the questions I held as I journeyed was how travel furnished opportunities for painting, and how paintings could reflect the cultures I traversed. I found it helpful to reflect on Robyn Stewart’s idea of the artist who becomes a navigator of culture by travelling with senses open and not taking what is seen for granted.27 A moment of discovery about this came as I spent time in Baroda and where each day I walked, reacquainting myself with the city where I had studied. One day, walking back to Nizampura I was crossing a busy intersection. As I stood in the median strip, trying to find a space to cross, I nearly fell over a small clay pot. Peering inside I saw it contained ashes. That evening talking to Anindita I mentioned the pot.“Oh, you find those are everywhere” she said. “In Ajmer” (the city where she grew up) “that’s how people try to get rid of bad luck.” Then she told me about the ritual for shedding one’s misfortune that is practiced all down the western face of India, from Ajmer to Baroda and beyond, using versions of the following recipe. Take one terracotta pot; place inside selected personal items that have been burned whilst being chanted over until reduced to ash. Place the ashes in the pot. Take the pot to a busy street preferably one not close to home, and position it where it is likely to knocked over by a passing car or pedestrian. Wait. Whoever knocks the pot over will become bearer of your bad luck, which will leave you. 27

Robyn Stewart, “Creating New Stories for Praxis: Navigations, Narrations, Neonarratives,” in Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 123, 24.

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A week later I walked past the median and noticed the pot had gone, perhaps smashed by a passing car. I thought about the motivation behind the ritual and felt drawn to revisit the place where it had stood. In my scroll I sketched this place, inserting a drawing of the pot as I remembered it. Developing the painting, I added details such as a small red and gold puja scarf I had observed elsewhere on that street.28 As I sat with the painting, thinking about the pot, I followed impulses to add other details, figments such as eyes watching from darkened doors, the form of a dead bird, a crow and finally, a figure representing a person who I imagined might have placed the pot down, and which took the form of a woman lying prone. I had lived in Baroda for two years during my Master’s study and found myself asking why I had not noticed such pots in that time. Being a ‘cultural navigator’ I realized was about not taking my surroundings for granted even as familiarity with these grew. I pondered this ability in light of the ideas of twentieth century anthropologist Kalervo Oberg who coined the term “culture shock”. Oberg had suggested that culture shock was not a static state but an intensifying progression toward familiarity.29 Though oscillation and revisiting allowed me to reconnect with environments, these modes held challenges as they required that I resist the tendency to take for granted that which I encountered on a regular basis. As part of the progression towards familiarity, culture shock invokes a spectrum of symptoms and stages identified by Oberg and which range from empathy to contempt. Crossing and re-crossing, I experienced these stages. They altered my perceptions of where I was. I painted about the sense that nothing felt familiar but when things did become more familiar, painting became about expressing the next stage. At such stages feelings would emerges of ambivalence or at times even contempt for aspects of life and culture. I worried that in this state my capacity to empathise with what I encountered contracted, and I struggled ongoingly to maintain awareness about this, and to regain and maintain a balance between perspectives. Discovering the motivations underlaying the ritual of the pot in terms of ridding oneself of bad luck through passing it on had given me something of a shock. I realised that I had been skating on the surface of the society which I traversed, even as I thought I had been getting to know it more deeply. Painting in this case was about trying to pierce this superficiality and move deeper, past personal proclivities and judgements, such as my sense of revulsion about the meanness of passing misfortune to another, and my lack of understanding of the complexity surrounding superstition more generally. Painting also provided a way of unpicking the discovery that dramas were unfolding about me, that the practice of black magic was alive and well in the seemingly sleepy and so-ordinary streets of suburban Baroda, and indeed any other city, village, and town. Painting in this case was about giving life to all these senses, as well as that sense that I was awakening to life going on around me. 28

Puja is the word that Hindus use with regard to the conducting of devotional rituals. The scarf to which I refer is a commonly used item of red and yellow, often fringed with gold tinsel or ribbon, which can be purchased cheaply in shops. 29 Kalervo Oberg, “Cultural Shock: Adjusting to New Cultural Environments (Reprint),” Practical Anthropology 7 (1960): 177, 82.

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This awakening was adhoc and ongoing. It happened incidentally, through doorway conversations and random encounters with people who shared stories and snippets. As an example, a couple living in the flat next door to a place where I stayed, a mathematics professor and an accountant, told me of two surefire ways to cure a stye in the eye. One way involved tying a string on the big toe of the foot opposing the eye. Another way was evocative of the pot ritual. This way involved picking a neighbour with ‘two and half’ people—a couple and one child. The person with the stye needed to go to their door and knock on it three times, once every day. Care had to taken to run away after knocking and not be seen by the family. After several days of doing this, the stye would disappear from the eye, to reappear in the eye of someone in that family. As time went on and I shared my story of the pot with others, and heard others in response, I began to see that most people were living with duality through having a foot in two or more worlds. One world was rational, the others governed by superstition, folklore, and the belief that problems could be sorted through rituals invoking magic. Continuing on from Baroda, I worked on the painting about the pot of bad luck. This took me a long time to complete for the more I learned and heard about superstition and ritual, the more I felt compelled to come back and add detail into the painting. Baroda. I feel the crunch of shards beneath my feet and look down to find smashed glass bangles. My eyes catch on the glitter of threads woven into puja scarves strewn on the ground, beneath trees wound round with red and orange threads. I muse over the many single shoes lining the road and the picture they offer of people walking with one bare foot. I sense rather than know how much people think about luck; bad luck, good luck, destiny luck, magic luck. Misfortune is an entity which can be persuaded to leave and bad luck is like a person that needs an itinerary and somewhere to go. Why do I make the painting…to process this way of seeing so interwoven with ritual and superstition? I note the black flags hanging from backs of rickshaws driven by Muslim drivers to ward off the evil eye, the rainbow coloured Ganeshas and other gods lining the dashboards of the Hindu drivers’ taxis. Drivers of every faith and creed seek divine assistance to make their work easier, safer, more profitable. Months later in Lahore I would be reminded of this while driving with a friend who had just bought a new car. He told me that he would drive it around Lahore for half an hour with a borrowed black goat on the back seat, a ritual he believes will bring good fortune and ward off evil.

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Miniature and Life Drawing: Integrating Opposites

Family working sugar cane juice machine. Australind. Detail

Purana Machine. Still from field documentary

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The online version of this chaptercontains the film Purana Machine available to authorised users. (Link) It was summer and on Baroda’s burning hot streets I walked in a daze along the shimmering roads. I came across a family working a machine that pressed out sugarcane juice. I was fascinated with the ancient design of the machine which had been fitted for mobility onto a wagon. The cane was fed through two enormous wooden cogs turned by hand, an ingenious system utilising a long handle that was pushed in circles around the wagon. Perhaps at one time a mule or donkey had done the pushing but it was the father of the family doing this work. I found his movements mesmerising as I sketched and filmed him treading round and round in the heat. At the wagon the man’s wife poured juice and served it in real glasses after which these were plunged into a bucket and washed. At the edges customers stood and looked on. Nearby under a tree sat their daughter whose name I learned was Puja. Her face resting on her hand had a dreamy look which went with the fairy-like quality of her floral dress. As I tried to capture the movement of Puja’s father circling the juice press, my sketching movements kept enlarging and I had great trouble keeping the drawing to a scale suited to the scroll. Later I looked this drawing that was so much larger and and cruder in appearance than other drawings and found myself becoming unhappy about the discrepancies. Miniature it seemed was aesthetically incompatible with that of life drawing which encouraged upsizing, and thick, dark, wobbly lines. I considered erasing the sketch and redrawing it using the video. I even began questioning the importance of in-situ drawing. All the miniaturists I knew worked from photographs. Why work from life at all, with its clumsy-looking, unrefined results? I put the scroll aside for a while and reobserved the film I had taken of the family as they worked their sugar press. I relived that time, the intensity of the heat, and the pleasure of that cold sweet juice that had tasted different and somehow better than the juice run through diesel-powered machines. I saw again the sweat soaked shirt of the man as he pushed the long handle. I remembered the family telling me that they did not own this machine but rented it two days a week. I remembered then understanding why they were working so hard through the hottest part of the day, using every precious hour. It occurred to me that in the situ drawing held a significance that could not be quantified or compared to a genre such as miniature. This drawing in its materiality evoked the complexity of the moments of encounter, revealing what I had seen. The quality of the lines spoke of the intangible traces of exchanges between subject and myself. In situ drawings also acknowledged the serendipitous nature of these encounters by representing the subject not as a ‘complete’ being, but in a moment of becoming, a tiny and live moment as glimpsed by me. Then also I understood that there was something about the conviction implicit in drawings made from life that offered a satisfying and somehow more authentic representation of an experience. Drawings made from memory, though at times necessary in order to fulfil the wish to remember might align more with the miniature canon. But these were invariably tentative in quality and aesthetically therefore less fulfilling.

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Thinking about the qualities of life drawing and what they brought to the overarching story in the scroll culminated in my decision to prioritise this over scale, and therefore over ideas of miniature. Though in time my skill with making small-scale life drawings improved, the shambolic nature of line that I came to see as typical of situ drawing was always there, only now I understood and appreciated this better as an evocative and useful language.

The Invitation of the Artist: Painting in Public Spaces

Sugar brothers; Man with a yellow balloon. Details. Australind

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Sketching at the Juice Lari. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the film Sketching at the Juice Lari available to authorised users. (Link) Across the street from Yogesh’s flat was another sugarcane juice business. This one was more permanent and took the form of a stall. The press was mechanical and ran on 2-stroke fuel, and the business was operated by a father and his three sons. The juice pressed from this machine did not taste as clear or pure as that I had had from the wooden machine, but I often went to this shop because it was nearby, and because the owner was friendly and didn’t mind my sitting at its small tables sketching goings on in the street. One day I set up my camera at the stall in order to document my process of sketching. The two young boys who worked there after school became interested in the scroll and as they sat opposite me looking at its paintings, they became subjects for drawing. Soon after this a family came to the stall for juice where they stood, watching me sketch as they waited for their glasses. At some stage I glanced up to see their little girl looking expectantly at me, such that it felt quite natural to invite her to sit for a portrait. The film, Sugarcane wallahs captures the above process, and thus the way that the shape of nomadic painting as a practice was often taking shape through unplanned kinds of engagement with people. In the film the impromptu drawing of the two boys, the unexpected arrival of the family and subsequent portrait of their daughter show how spontaneity and immersion combined in this in-situ process. As passers-by stop to look and become involved, their ‘interruption’ of the drawing in the process contributes in various ways to the unfolding painting. Films such as Sketching in Chandni Chawk and Sketching at the juice lari allow for seeing how in-situ processes could often be guided by such unfolding dynamics that at the time escaped my notice,

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immersed as I was in the moment, my attention divided between subject, drawing, and various external forces.

The Evolving Role of Film While my initial intentions with film had been observation and documentary, in the field these purposes evolved. In cities, film provided a way to negotiate the organisation of often chaotic or busy spaces. Further on film became a means of diary keeping, allowing me to account for my time with subjects, keeping me feeling linked with them, and providing information that assisted with developing paintings. Editing these ‘diaries’ saw film in time become a way of mirroring the scrolls’ development. In such ways filming thus gradually took on a more active role in my practice. Re-observing some of the films showed me that there was something about drawing in public, with the scroll, and perhaps also about being a foreigner doing so, that invited interaction. This helped me to see how the practice was much about opening to these possibilities as they presented. Film also revealed how peripatetic practice was formed of different kinds of social interactions that importantly were often invitations. Besides the invitations that I received which yielded opportunities to make paintings, there were the invitations that as an artist I could see I was extending, by sketching in public spaces, and by responding to people’s interest in the scroll. There was mutuality in this mode of working as positioning myself in public put the balance of power in favour of the subject without whose permission and participation I could not make my work. A day in the field could bring many unanticipated encounters, each of which asked for a different response and way of working. Prioritising drawing meant that I could not always document these. This was the case when having finished sketching the two boys and little girl at the juice stall, I had packed up camera and scroll, and walked off down the street thinking my drawing for the day was done. It was hot, dusty, noisy, crowded. I was walking with the scroll, tired from having crouched over it for the last hour and keen for a break. The sight of an enormous yellow balloon walking towards me stopped me in my tracks. As it came closer I could see the balloon was being held in the arm of a blind man whose other hand gripped the thin shoulder of a young boy. A large fluffy white seed blew on the path ahead of them, like a small white bobbing guide. I gazed at the tableau of man, boy, balloon, and seed until they had grown small in the distance. Then I scooped up my pack and headed back to Yogeshs’ place to sketch them in the scroll whilst the memory was fresh.

Man with a Grin

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Man with a Grin

Man with a grin, Australind. Detail

One day I passed a man sitting on the footpath with his small bundle of belongings. He grinned at me and I smiled back. But when his expression did not change I became uncertain. He said nothing, the grin uwavering, and for the minute that I stood there, his expression remained the same. I would have liked to sit down and try to talk to him, perhaps also sketch him, but I hesitated. The rictus of his smile disturbed me, and though I felt sure he could not help it, I also felt afraid and slowly walked away. In my scroll I made a drawing from memory of the man with the grin, which as an image allowed me to ponder the experience. I wondered if his grin represented a state of physical paralysis, or was it perhaps an expression that, having crossed the line from lucidity to insanity, had become fixed in time. I reflected on the way that it only takes holding one kind of expression on the human face for several seconds longer than usual to elicit uncomfortable feelings about its wearer, and the sense of a wall through which mutual communication cannot happen.

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Being ‘Out There’ and ‘In Repose’ When people ask what peripatetic painting looks like as a practice, the only answer I feel confident to give is that it is always changing, mutable in response to the the diversity and singularity of situations, contexts, and environments in which the artist may find themself. However over the course of my journeys in India and Pakistan I began to observe phases in my own practice that gave it a particular shape and rhythm. One of these phases was extrovert or ‘out-there’. This phase involved venturing forth into the world to engage with it through methods of walking, gleaning, life drawing, filming, and social interaction. Out-there phases would present me with opportunities to encounter life, people, and material to paint about. Such phases of my practice were stimulating, exciting, and all-consuming, the embodiment of a nomadic mode. I also had phases when my practice became introspective, or ‘in-there’. During in-there phases I withdrew, either to the room or space where I slept, or not possible then to a library or quiet café. In that phase I would develop what I had drawn, gathered, and encountered into paintings. Wim Wenders and Mary Zournazi, drawing on the work of the philosopher Bachelard, describe such states of repose as inducing reveries where “thought and consciousness become pure states of observation and understanding”. Such states awaken us to the richness of reality and the imaginative potential of the mind, transforming the way we look at the world.30 Theologian Carolyn Myss suggests that our need for contemplation is an essential one. Contemplation, she says, is one of ways in which we go about acquiring the time that by nature we need for considering actions. Reflection is a food, as crucial for our spiritual and emotional maintenance, development, and evolution as vitamins are for the repair of our cell tissue. When we reflect, we are able to take stock of and process the world, and our existence within it. Without reflection our lives are merely strings of events in which we are caught up. Choice is significantly a process reliant on reflection, which Myss believes, offers inherent spaces of creativity, and also healing. Without reflection she says, we are not able to be truly human, and yet we live in a world increasingly devoid of spaces and opportunities for reflection, and in which practices of reflection are not taught, rather these are relegated to the rarefied spheres of religiosity or philosophy.31

30

Wim Wenders and Mary Zournazi, Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2013), 47. 31 Carolyn Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit.

From Baroda to Bengal: Noticing Shifts from the Air

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From Baroda to Bengal: Noticing Shifts from the Air

Path from Baroda to Kolkata and return route

A principle of nomadic art practice is the noticing of subtle variations and changes in culture and in terrain. I found his was easier to do if I was travelling by slower means. Walking was ideal, with the next best thing sitting on a wagon or cycle rickshaw. Within and between towns and cities public transport such as buses, motor rickshaws, and trains were also good for viewing changes in terrain. Trains were helpful in that they often slowed to crawl for periods of time allowing for immersive observation and sketching or filming from the window. My plan had been to travel by train from Baroda to Bengal so as to be able to observe gradual changes in the land. However due to Diwali (a major north Indian festival) rail seats were booked solidly for weeks. Much as I would have liked to wait and travel the slower way my research schedule required that I forge on and so I bought a flight. I was disappointed to forgo the train however as I found, the air journey yielded its own perspectives of the two thousand kilometres separating the states of Gujarat and Bengal, stimulating me to log these in paintings. On the plane I pressed my face to the glass, fascinated by the thick dust that had been generated by the desert and the way that it hung in delicate veils in the air. On the

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ground I saw dams bisecting rivers, canals running in dead straight lines to the cities, and abandoned rivers winding like pale sad snakes in waterless undulations over the baking ground. Thousands of infinitesimal villages glittered against the desert sand, some dotting the banks past which rivers had once flowed, others situated deep in the desert. Even at that height I could see the layouts of the villages, how each had its bazaar and central hub from which streets spiralled out in radial form. There were thousands of such villages, each situated a few kilometres from the next like a network of tiny stars across the land. With suddenness the arid yellow zone shifted to an intense green. Descending into Kolkata, the plane wove through tall clouds piled like ice-cream. It was a city of tall palms, of ponds like moats between buildings. It had been raining and the air was full of vapour. Kolkata appeared verdent, like a dream, not at all how I had imagined this densely populated megacity.

Over Kolkata. Australind. Detail

The Riaz Mohalla My plan in Bengal had initially been to travel to Viswa Bharati University in Santiniketan to see if I could meet with researchers and artists with connections or knowledge of Patuya Sangit, and I thought to stay in Kolkata but a few days. However at the last minute in Baroda a friend of Yogesh arranged for me to stay with a friend called Taufik and his family. Though I felt somewhat shy accepting an invitation from people I did not know, in the spirit of Freya Stark I felt curious and did not want to refuse, and so I came as a guest to the home of the Riazes.

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Taufik Riaz and his family lived in an enclave or mohalla in the suburb of Beckbagan. They were academics and aesthetes and Taufik himself was a painter, writer, and performance artist. He was happily unmarried, and his rooms evoked different sides of his personality. One room contained nothing but a bed and a rack of khadi, the traditional homespun clothing embraced by Mahatma Gandhi. The other room was chaotic, stuffed with the materiality of Taufik’s life. This was the room where I stayed. To encourage me to accept the invitation, Yogesh’ friend had emphasised the largeness of Taufik’s home forgetting to add that it housed joint ke family, which meant several families and therefore that space was precious. It was a beautiful, atmospheric house perhaps fifty or sixty years old, rimmed by a small, jade green garden, and a somewhat endangered property, I sensed as just beyond its walls I could see apartment developments slithering skyward. On the evening I arrived, though I was tired and not hungry, etiquette required that I sit with Taufik and his mother to dinner. Their table fairly groaned with dishes; spiced vegetables, chicken, rice, pickles, halvas—but no roti. From this point on it was almost always rice until I left Bengal. Rice I came to know was an edible pillar of Bengali culture, Even love I was to learn could be measured in cups of soft, boiled, white rice. In Taufik’s home I was not permitted to clean, cook, or bring gifts. Perhaps it was as well as in the monsoonal climate of Kolkata I suddenly myself going at half-speed. Unused to the high levels of humidity, I was perpetually bathed in sweat and dehydration lead to severe migraines. The migraines would hang around for days rendering me tired and useless. Taufik, his family, and his friends loaded me with advice. Drink water, don’t drink tea, eat a sweet, eat lychees, don’t smoke, lie down, walk, sleep, stay here, go home, take aspirin, take panadol, take dahi (yoghurt), take laxatives, pour oil on head, pour water on head, ok now you can smoke, have a bath, see a doctor, eat rice… With Taufik and his friends I was treated to stories of Kolkata and dazzling fragments of cultural information. I found sound of the Bangla language itself a sweet, at times birdlike. There was charming phonetic reversal. Sari became shari, rickshaw became rishcaw, and one day in a small village shop I heard Scotchbrite scrubbing pads called Scrotchbite, which had me on the floor in fits of helpless laughter. I learned other important, pretty-sounding words; brishki (rain), mishti (sweet), and shristi meaning creation. I sleep in a room overflowing with Taufik’s life. Each morning I am woken by his friends who slope in, fall on the bed, light up a cigarette, pull out a book, and lean on me as if I were a pillow. I learn to wake and scrape myself together pretty quickly. At Taufik’s I have no privacy to speak of except in the bathroom. Sometimes it crosses my mind that I could be lodging in a private room with some dignity. I remember the time and effort I gave to putting in a complex travel application to allow me to budget for staying in hostels. But to be with people, invited into their world, is an intoxicating experience for which staying alone would mean forgoing this one, of the Riazes extra/ordinary world.

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My scroll is not dealing well with the monsoon. Humidity has made the paper sodden and limp. My watercolours in their pans have been reduced to lumps of moulding, sodden paste. I myself have to paint with a towel on my head to catch the sweat from my forehead before it drips into the scroll. When the rain pauses I roll the scroll carefully like a baby and take it out to play on the streets of Beckbagan. As they begin to gently steam, I return to the tea stall which is being fired up again, to sketch life going back to normal.

Taxidrivers of Kolkata. Detail, Australind. Hotspot for the sound can be located on the taxi

In Kolkata ancient trams rumble alongside fat old buses, bulging yellow Ambassador taxis, and creaking fragile stick-insectlike bicycle rikshaws. Taxis are hard to find because high demand has allowed drivers to become very fussy about who they carry. Cab after cab refuses to take me because, I am told, I am badly dressed. And I note how Taufik’s elegant mother, resplendent in her sari on her way to a concert, has no difficulty hailing a taxi at all. Kolkata’s atmosphere is wet and boiling. Everyone is running, in solidarity, with sweat. I do not walk down the street so much as slide under the chins, across the chests, and around the bellies of patient and forbearing Kolkatans. The air feels like a great press bearing down. Tempers are cool as they were fiery in Gujarat perhaps because it is painful it to raise one’s temperature above mild irritation. This city with the water drenching it in warm torrents has a mood and atmosphere that I find visually compelling. The people standing patiently beneath door lintels, awnings, umbrellas and pieces of plastic waiting calmly for the waters to subside bring humanity to the otherwise grey scape. Whilst I don’t paint these things I sense

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them as creative, stimulating and shaping my experience, and thus the ways in which I may come in time to represent this place through painting.

Ghosts of Saint Paul’s Cathedral: Painting Phantasmagoria

Shonali Alo and Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Detail. Australind

Certain period buildings in Kolkata speak of its history as the English colonial capital. Though I knew little of this history, their monumental nature spoke patently of the wealth that the English Raj generated during its reign in India. On Splannat (the Bangla version of Esplanade) the edifice of Saint Paul’s Cathedral beckoned. In its foyer I became engrossed in memorial plaques describing many who had served the Raj militarily. There were obituaries to soldiers who had died on the Afghan front, youths of ages that stopped my breath. Fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty—young men and women, adolescents, who died in battles, or in labour whilst giving birth, such a long way from home. I began reading the obituaries out loud and recording them. I did not know what I would do with all these sad anecdotes, yet I felt compelled to acknowledge and carry them away with me. Outside on the lawn I sat to sketch the cathedral’s facade. I found its mammoth proportions challenging to capture and compress into a drawing. I aspired to make the kind of drawings that I had seen in Company School albums; exquisitely

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detailed, miniature architectural drafts. Attempting and failing generated in me deep appreciation for the skills of making those drawings.

Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Kolkata

Sitting on the grass, my mind returned to the obituaries and with this a sense of the cathedral as occupied by ghosts. Later as I developed a painting about the building I wondered how to convey visually the feeling of these ghosts flitting about it. An idea for conveying this came from learning that the butterfly or titli in Bengali folklore is thought to be a spirit body. Thus I alluded to my experience of phantasmagoria by populating my painting with tiny white butterflies.

Shonali Alo: A Language of Phenomena Whilst searching for vocabulary to describe the numinous qualities of Saint Paul’s Cathedral I experienced an atmospheric phenomenon, an effect associated with monsoonal weather that since then, despite spending monsoons in other subcontinental cities, I have only experienced in Kolkata. I was searching for triple zero brushes with my friend Aopala on Esplanade, the showcase street of the British, lined with magnificent buildings built during the Raj. The interior of the art materials shop was of this period and beautifully finished inside with antique mahogany glassfronted cupboards. The roof was high enough to contain a circular upper balcony with a railing of finely wrought brass. Its niches held storerooms serviced by tiny

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steps, ladders, and miniature doors, accessible I mused only by tiny and very nimble shop attendants, or children. I was turning out of this shop into the street, shiny with puddles from a recent downpour when I noticed the light had changed. The sky had turned tangerine, daubed with strokes of palest blue. A deep gold light had flooded the streets, staining the period buildings, limning their ornamented facades, and transforming the city into a scene of weird, unearthly beauty. My jaw fell open as I tried to absorb this incandescent light event but within minutes it passed and the street faded back to its usual overtones of grey and green. Bengalis call this phenomenon koney dekhas halo, or shonali alo meaning ‘golden light’. One of Taufik’s friends told me that in its full sense shonali alo referred to the light that a bride appears to possess just before she is married. Folklore says that during shonali alo lovers are permitted to marry without familial permission. However as I observed this phenomenon to be a fleeting event, the idea that there might be time to enact a marriage ceremony before it faded lent the story certain pathos.32 Seeing Kolkata drenched in the ethereal light transformed my sense of the city in a way that has been described by Steve Pile in his research of the phantasmagoric qualities of cities and urban spaces; “At some point cities begin to shimmer: what is real is no longer quite where it was, even as a state of mind.”33 In Bengal, weather offered pathways into understanding culture as I learned that clouds and atmospheric phenomena were a meaningful lexicon. Different kinds of weather and climatic effects had names, meanings, and associated stories; I remember standing with my friend Poushali one day as she pointed to a cloud in the sky and said with a smile, “Look, megha duth” which means “cloud bearing message from lover”. Having witnessed shonali alo, I wanted to remember it. I had an idea to allude to the event in my painting of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. My challenge was to achieve in paint a representation, knowing that I was constrained in scale, and also in terms of skill with creating such a fantastic light effect. Another challenge was that I had no recourse to photographs or films meaning I was reliant on my memory, in which the effect had already taken on mythic and shimmering propertions. Thinking to suggest the idea of the cathedral submerged in golden light, I stained my sketch with washes of saffron, rose, lemon, and orange. However I lost control of the wash, and in the process the painting became overwhelmingly orange. To reduce the saturation, I washed the paper as I had seen watercolourists do, by running water over the section. The problem was that the paper of my scroll, which under normal circumstances would have tolerated washing, had become weakened through exposure to humidity which meant that it was now pushed to its limits. In the face of more water, the scroll began disintegrating and my focus shifted rapidly to stabilising it.

32

Michal Glikson, interview with Pobhitro Das, (Kolkata, June 12, 2013). Steve Pile, Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd, 2005), 3.

33

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In the course of researching methods for stabilising my paper, I discovered how safeda—the white lime-based pigment that is mixed with gum Arabic for a base layer in miniatures, could be laid on in thin layers to fill and bolster the paper. The action of burnishing these layers when dry constituted an effective reparative technique while providing a smooth surface for painting. Such processes that saved the scroll from further disintegration enabled me to to carry on working over the following months and years. As an experiment this became a testimony to techniques with safeda and burnishing in that the scroll Australind remained whole, strong and viable, affording a practical insight into the longevity of surviving eleventh century Persian miniatures.

Advance Haircut One day while walking along the main street of Beckbagan I passed a small hairdresser’s shop. I could hear laughter and felt curious to see what was happening inside. My hair was clinging like a hot curtain to my neck, and I imagined how much cooler I might be with a trim. I slid open the door. Passing beneath a curtain I found a tiny shop fitted out with a huge, old barber-style chair and a bevy of hairdressers who welcomed me and bustled round in excitement. Five hairdressers, or rather, one hairdresser and four apprentices coaxed me into the chair. I explained, slowly and with drawings how I wanted the hair trimmed to a mid-neck length bob, simply and without layers. Having done this I relaxed, looked down at the magazines they had placed in my lap and disappeared into the world of Bollywood gupshup, or gossip. I came to with a start sometime later when I felt scraping up the back of my head. Putting my hands up to my scalp I could find no hair and gasped, Kya karieh? (What are you doing!) We are giving you “advance haircut”, the women explained happily, and held a mirror for me to view. They had pretty much shaved the back of my head from ear to ear and almost up to the crown. A few strands hung, barely hiding the stubble, whereupon I burst into tears. I found the grace to pay the hairdressers but as I limped away from the shop I felt consumed by a sense of calamity. Culturally in India I understood the importance of hair. At least half of all advertising in India seemed to be concerned with achieving long shiny hair. Women could be seen on doorsteps morning, noon, and night, combing and oiling their hair. Hair pronouced health, abundance, and identity and in many places, particularly beyond the cities a female without some length of hair was an anomaly. I had not had much hair but there had been enough to stave off androgyny. I was not too proud to accept help as a solo traveller and being recognisably female had the advantage of attracting assistance, and in some cases protection. When I crept into Taufik’s house and showed him my head he quipped, “It’ll grow again”. Then I felt anger. I had a feeling that had the crowning glory of his own sister, wife, or mother been hacked off similarly, that there would be howls of

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fury and sympathy. I found myself venting through a self-portrait of my now twoheaded self, the self of the recent past with hair, to which I remained attached, and the near-bald self in the mirror.

Advance haircut. Australind. Detail

Portraying oneself can be healing, allowing for a process of stepping back and picturing the story in which you presently stand. Diaries by nature are chronicles, composed of unfolding, ever shifting reflections upon the self. Self-portrayal had come to occupy an important place in painting as I travelled, for in the scrolls this offered a means of processing events and different psychological/emotional states from depression, to confusion, frustration, exhilaration, loss, grief, illness, and humiliation. As outlets of expression, self portraits offered me a means of continuity in painting when circumstances or predicaments felt overwhelmingly distracting. And because a diary offers freedom from having to produce a logical or thought-out narrative, I could work with self portraiture spontaneously as and when the need arose.

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A Boy Comes Singing

A boy comes singing. Australind. Detail

One day I was catching the Kolkata metro to an outer burg known as Baidyabati. The ideas of writer Freya Stark concerning the ‘proffered hand’ had taken over my methodology at this time and my purpose with this journey was take up an invitation to stay with Amitabo, a research student at Viswa Bharati University, and his family. A small boy came through the train, moving slowly, followed by an older musician jingling bells. He sung a song from a famous Bangla movie called Swapna - The Dream. The tin he clutched against his narrow chest was large in his small hands. Into it passengers tossed rupees. His eyes were huge and sightless. His cracking voice soared through the roof of the train, straight up to the gods and back down through my chest. His voice, so old for such a little boy, gave the song an ageless quality, ancient as the low-lying green hills through which we glided and which it achingly described; O Akash, shona shona. O mati, shobuj, shobuj. No tum rang er chi hri doy range che. Alor joa re khusir bandh bhengeche

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O the sky is golden, golden. Oh the earth is green, green. Our hearts are touched and coloured by your new colours. Your blinding light unbinds the barriers to our happiness34 The memory of the small boy with his large blind eyes who moved through the train guided by the hand of an old man who steered him from behind, stayed with me. There was something about the way that people in the train had offhandedly thrown a coin into the tin that struck me, perhaps because for them what was on offer was not extraordinary. But it was for me, and when I got to Baidyabati the first thing I did was to sketch a drawing of the boy from memory in my scroll. I had managed to take a short recording of his singing, and as I listened to it again, the painting developed through combinations of memory and his song with its ageless, aching quality.

Chai with Manubhai

Chai with Manubhai. Australind. Detail

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I use an informal translation of the song “O Akash, Shona Shona”, from the film “Swapna” (Dream), sung by Hemanto Mukerpadyaye.

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If I was spending time, perhaps a few weeks in a place, my first forays usually involved roaming the streets in search of a chai wallah or tea maker. The chai wallah needed to be someone who was friendly and who would not be irritated by my frequent and extended visits at their stall for I liked very much to be able to sit and sketch the life that happened around such places, fuelled by a stream of tea. Sometimes chai wallahs did not appreciate the presence of a gauri (female foreigner) whose constant pleas for chai were accompanied by dubious activities with a pencil and a scroll. But sometimes I found chai wallahs who were welcoming, and who were interested to encourage my activities. When this happened, their stall became like a second home, their tea my staple beverage, and sometimes also their persons, or their stories came into the scroll. In Beckbagan I discovered the chai stall of Manubhai through Taufik and his friends who were regular patrons. Manubhai was round-faced, friendly, and keen to practice stretching his smattering of English into conversations, which I appreciated immensely. He minded neither the scroll nor the quantity of chai that I was want to consume, so that soon I became something of a fixture at his stall. Manu Bhai was Muslim and his day would be interspersed with prayers taken at the local masjid. I would sit at the stall sketching or watching the life on the street, comfortable in the knowing that it was fine if I sat there for hours, and that upon his return Manu Bhai’s face would light up, he would soon be telling me stories in binglish (bangla-english), and tea would be on its way without even having to ask. Manubhai served chai in the usual small tea glasses but upon request he would also pour the chai into the little brown matti cup called a mudda. The traditional cup for tea-drinking in India made of unfired clay, mudda would typically be used once and thrown to the ground where, assisted by the rain, they would slowly dissolve back into clay. The ecology of clay cups is part of their beauty, the other is that the clay imbues the chai with earthy, chocolatey flavours. Sometimes Manubhai would throw instant coffee granules into his brew for a dynamic combination of clay, coffee, and tea. Drinking this hot, caffeine-laden brew in the humid, boiling atmosphere of Kolkata would bring on a kind of coronary. My heart would beat wildly, I would break out in a sweat, and feel as if I were going to faint. But the brew was so delicious, and so addictive that I was only able to break the habit when I moved away from Beckbagan and Mohanbhai’s lari and travelled on.

Under Howrah Station

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Under Howrah Station

Under Howrah. Australind. Detail

Under Howrah Station. Still from field documentary

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The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Under Howrah Station, available to authorised users. (Link) Between July and October I oscillated between the city of Kolkata, the university town of Santiniketan, and the tiny village of Naya. Travelling to these destinations meant negotiating Howrah station—the hub of Kolkata’s rail system. I found the congested and chaotic terminal extremely confusing and if I wasn’t very careful would invariably become lost. On one trip while trying to locate my exit I emerged by mistake into an section of the station where excavations were taking place. Turning a corner I came across a group of men, members of a workgang, who were coated head to foot in black mud. On impulse I followed them round to a door through which they disappeared, and poked my head in. Inside the roof was hung with pulleys. Men almost naked and black with mud worked the pulleys by hand, bringing bucket after bucket up of monsoon water which they dumped into a drain. I went to step inside and almost fell into a deep black hole. One of the men shone a light for me as I peered into its depths where I could make out a room about twenty metres below. Down there men, chest deep in black water, were filling buckets and attaching these to the pulleys that others hauled up and emptied. The mud and cramped conditions made me rethink bringing out the scroll to make sketches, and instead I pulled out my camera to film. When the men above ground saw my camera they leapt outside and arranged themselves in a tableau, asking me to take their picture. I felt my lack of language patently, so much did I wish to be able to speak with them. I tried to ask a few questions of the foreman. “How does this work?” I asked, waving my hand at the room. “We are a people pump” he said. How much money do you get per day? I asked. “Two hundred rupees”, he said, which is about six Australian dollars. Later, in the scroll I reconstructed figures of the foreman and a boy who could not have been more than fifteen, and the hole in the ground. In these men with their joviality, smiles and laughter whilst swimming in toxic sludge, I saw heroes. I thought of the great blind river dolphins that once swam Hugli-Bharithati, the other name for the Ganga or Ganges River at whose mouth sits Kolkata. The river dolphins are thought to be extinct due to pollution of the waters. Somehow the working conditions of the men that required their immersion in polluted water and the fate of the dolphins linked behind my eye and was perhaps how images of both came be present in the one painting. I returned to Howrah after several days with the intention to talk more with the men, having arranged for my friend Biblab to come and translate. But when we found the place where they had been working, the team were gone and the watery black hole had been closed up. I reproached myself for neglecting to take the foreman’s mobile number, for my lack of planning would now dictate the terms on which this story would be told. Nevertheless I worked with what I had, which were the film I had taken. my memories, and the abiding impressions made upon me by the men themselves.

The Story of Rahima Begam

The Story of Rahima Begam

The story of Rahima Began. Detail. Australind

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One day I was on Kolkata’s crowded streets when I heard my name called. I turned to find myself face to face with Rahima Begam, an old friend from Baroda. I had not seen Rahima for several years and we sat down to chat at a chai stall near the Kolkata Fine Arts Academy. As I showed her my scroll I struggled to connect the vibrant young woman I had known on the other side of India with the one before me now. She was talking about her life since graduating from Baroda but her sentences would trail off to not be completed, and there were long pauses. Her hair was cropped close, her eyes frequently glazed over as if her thoughts were far away. I wondered that she who had always been so eloquent now struggled to complete a sentence. Yet she had seen me in the crowd, and remembered my name. Over the next few months I met up with Rahima whenever I was in Kolkata and so I learned her story in bits and pieces. I began recording our conversations thinking to piece them and thus her story together. During our meetings I made more sketches of her which developed into paintings. I had met Rahima during my student exchange and she had invited me to stay with her for several weeks. During that time I saw her organise student rallies, literary events, and make films alongside full time study. She was a bright star and many boys at college were fascinated with her. They wrote her poems which they slipped into her bag, serenaded her on beaten up guitars, and caste her as the heroine in their student films. But Rahima’s interests were freedom, art, and the city of Bombay which she loved unconditionally. One weekend Rahima had taken me to Bombay. We rode fourth class on the train for ten rupees, sitting on a grill for six hours, and the closer we got, the more excited she became. Day was just dawning when we arrived and the first thing she did was take me to eat her favourite food, vada pav—a fried spiced potato patty with chutney on a tiny bread bun. “All Bombay runs on vada pav” Rahima would say. She showed me the famous tiffin wallahs, deftly negotiating the streets with ladders laden with lunch orders, before taking me to the mohalla where her uncle lived with his wife and six children in a tiny one-room apartment. For a few years after graduating things had gone well for Rahima. She wrote, made films, and had a well followed blog. She maintained no contact with her family who were unrelenting in their pressure for her to submit to an arranged marriage. But she badly missed her mother who she described as ‘a captive’ and after three years went to see her. During the visit Rahima’s uncles and aunts arranged her marriage at which point Rahima lost her temper, and in her own words, became hysterical.

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Her uncles called the police and Rahima was forced into a paddywagon and taken to a psychiatric hospital. There she was restrained, sedated and force-fed an antipsychotic drug known as Risperdal. Risperdal had been banned in the United States due to the horrendous nature of its side effects but it was still being used extensively in India. Friends became alerted to Rahima’s situation and helped her to escape from the hospital to Bengal, far from the reaches of her family but by then Rahima had been been on Risperdal for more than twenty days.35 In Kolkata Rahima struggled to deal with effects of the drug. It had impaired her ability to focus. She could still function independently after a fashion, but she could not work and was surviving on the little money that her friends could spare. She could still cook beautifully and one day she created a wonderful meal for ten people with only a few vegetables and spices but she had to be supervised as her concentration would lapse and she would halt mid activity for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, the intention forgotten. Risperdal had also numbed her reflexes and nervous system such that she could not register pain, and her hands and arms were covered with burns and cuts from cooking on her own. Her focus would also lapse during eating which was perhaps why she had lost so much weight. Rahima’s story asked for a scroll to itself, but as this was not possible at the time, I decided to explore using a composite image which would allow me to load and layer information into a singular image. Composites as mentioned earlier in context of the Canberra scroll were a handy lexicon for painting. One of the advantages of creating a composite was that it allowed for the morphing and integration of existing imagery in the scroll. I had a couple of rough pencil sketches of Rahima and after some thought, saw a way of unifying them through the use of pattern. The idea to explore pattern came from thinking of the paintings of Anindita Bhattacharya and her techniques with creating intricate patterns. She often began with a theme or topic which she would research, in time collecting a cluster of forms that she felt were symbolic. These might be ancient motifs, iconic figures, animals, plants, or objects such as coins. She would explore her motifs, playing with their visual elements, until she had a small replicable pattern. Sometimes she would paint into these or cut into them creating intricate jalis or papercuts. She would layer these over other paintings thus creating intricate micronarratives. The complexity and encoded nature of her patterning represents a strategy in India with its growing climate of artistic censorship by allowing the artist a means by which to quietly express subversive ideas and thoughts.

35

Katie Thomas, “J. & J. To Pay $2.2 Billion in Risperdal Settlement,” The New York Times, Nov. 4 2013.

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Anindita Bhattacharya. Work in progress. Detail. Image courtesy of the artist

The above detail shows how the artist has created a field of visual subtext by juxtaposing patterns. One pattern utilises a floral motif based on a design by eighteenth century artist and utopian Socialist William Morris, whilst the other pattern, a papercut, draws on an ancient script. Thinking about pattern, at the forefront of my mind were the changes the drug had wrought on Rahima. In the limited space of the scroll I needed to be visually succinct, prompting me to choose a pill as the key motif for my pattern, a simple form which was easy to reproduce. I also used a grid, a form which I have felt signified ideas of enclosure, described by author Doris Lessing as a “mindset” indicating inflexibility, possession and an “imperious stamp”. When I filled the grid with pills this suggested itself as a metaphor for constriction and became the device for connecting the two sketches of Rahima.36

36

Doris Lessing, Canopus in Argos; Archives: The Sirian Experiments; the Report by Ambien Ii of the Five (Great Britain: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1981), 277, 78.

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Within the grid I left blank spaces to reference those few days on which Rahima told me she had managed to spit out a pill. I also drew hair-fine lines flowing through the pills to symbolise Rahima’s loss of her long hair that in Indian cultures signifies beauty, health, and feminine power.

Meeting Mousumi

Mousumi. Australind. Detail

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I sometimes met people whilst travelling en route whereby a painting might begin in response to conversations on a bumpy journey. Whilst travelling from Kolkata to the town of Santiniketan by train, I met Mousumi who was sitting opposite me, and who shared with me her singular story. I was born in Bangladesh. As a little girl I loved dancing and would dance all the time. One day my movements caught the eye of a Kathkali guru living in our town who offered to train me. My parents considered dance unacceptable as a career but I begged so hard to learn that they allowed me to learn with the guru. But they told me that my lessons would have to stop when I turned sixteen. When I turned sixteen and I was not longer allowed to dance I became extremely depressed. When I turned eighteen my family sent me to Bengal to study English Literature degree at Viswa Bharati University in Santiniketan. A few months into my course I learned that auditions were being held for the degree in traditional dance studies. I thought that if I could gain admission to this prestigious program then my family might accept my dancing as a respectable career. I secretly auditioned for the course wondering if I would get in, as I was by this time much out of practice. On the day that successful applicants were announced, I secretly visited the board and saw my name at the top of the list, with the highest mark for admission. I called my family, but they were angry and said that if did not complete the English degree they would cut me off financially. I had no friends from whom I could ask money and no way of earning an income in Santiniketan. Though I wanted so much to dance I saw no way but to give in to my family’s wishes. I completed the English degree after which my family arranged my marriage to a man in Bolpur. We have been married for ten years. My husband is kind, but I still have no freedom. I am not allowed to work, or even choose what I wear. Today you see me wearing shalwar kameez, which I like best because it is free and easy. But I may only wear this when I am travelling. At home my husband’s family insist I wear saris. When I’m not in saris my husband makes me wear western clothes, like jeans. I hate saris and I hate jeans, but I have no choice.37

37

Mousumi, interview by Michal Glikson, 2013.

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Meeting Mousumi. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Meeting Mousumi, available to authorised users. (Link) In the train Mousumi talked. I listened and drew her portrait as the train bounced and the pencil jumped. When I had finished I showed her the drawing. She looked at it and sighed. I asked her tentatively if she still dreamed of dancing. She looked down at herself saying, “I have given up that dream. And it would never be possible now because I have grown so heavy.” But she told me she had a new dream, which was to convince her husband to permit her to apply for work, after all she was highly skilled with English. She wanted to earn her own money, and eventually, someday, be independent. It’s a secret, she said. Mousumi and I share a rickshaw from the station. She alights at the gate of a house where a plump man is waiting. She introduces him as her husband. I shake his hand, hug Mousumi, and we say goodbye. As the rickshaw rolls on I look back at her, feeling my freedom with intensity. Years after meeting Mousumi I had the opportunity to have a few lessons in Kathak dance with a guru in Lahore and I thought of Mousumi. The movements gave feelings of being light, airbound and joyous, deepening my comprehension of the loss that Mousumi had suffered through not being allowed to dance.

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Rahima and Mousumi: Visually Bridging Distinct Stories My encounter with Mousumi yielded two paintings. One was a development of the shaky portrait sketched on the train. The other also a portrait, imagines how Mousumi might have looked as she danced. Although Rahima and Mousumi’s stories were singular, as women conducting personal struggles for independence I saw parallels between their stories. I sought to indicate their connection by linking their images via a flow of paint. When dry, this extended the dancer’s veil, connecting the two images.

Use of bridging wash to link Mousumi and Rahima paintings

In the scrolls can be seen different ways of bridging paintings. In addition to flows of paint I sometimes used motifs to draw the viewer’s eye across paintings to suggest connections between distinct but related images in the scroll as in the examples below.

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Examples of ‘stepping stone’ motifs that encourage the viewers eye to travel through paintings

Santiniketan: Painting as Witnessing

The Bodhi Tree. Detail. Australind

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The town of Santiniketan is located about two and a half hours from Kolkata. As a place Santiniketan became famous for its connection with the Tagore family whose were one of Bengal’s most important and wealthy families. Astute in business, the Tagores used their wealth to support education and the arts. Thriving cultural art forms in Bengal today owe much to the Tagores patronage, including the Chitrakars of Naya who tell stories of the visionary Bengali poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore in their scrolls. Santiniketan which means “place of peace” takes its name from an ashram built by DebendranathTagore in 1862. In 1921 the gardens and forests that he planted became the grounds for the school that his son Rabindranath established. The school would become a centre of enlightened learning to which artists and academics from throughout India and the world came, to learn, share and contribute.38 In Santiniketan I wandered over the campus. The air was cool, moistened and canopied by enormous spreading trees. I came across an immense Banyan tree which I had been told had been planted by Rabindranath Tagore about one hundred years ago. In the tradition of the Upanishads, Tagore had been known for sitting and teaching beneath this tree. I wanted to go to it, but the tree was enclosed in a wide circle of high fencing topped with razor wire. The gate was locked and the tree could only be looked at from a distance of about twentyfive meters. I felt a desire to get close to the tree, touch it, walk round it, sit beneath its incredible spreading branches and hanging root system, and sketch it without the interference of the fence. But when I requested permission for access this was refused. I persisted, first by trying to climb the fence and being hauled off it by guards, then by calling staff and friends who were alumni of the university. A lengthy bureaucratic process ensued as Drupadhi, an alumnus of Kala Bhavana fine arts faculty negotiated with the guard on my behalf. From where I stood I could hear her shouting down the phone at him, saying that she and her classmates belonged to Santiniketan, that they were its children and the tree theirs by right. It was supposed to be freely accessible to all, and this was the spirit in which they had been taught. “Don’t make us come there and fight for this freedom”, Dhrupadhi warned the guard, “Don’t make us do this”. Having got off the phone, he let me in. I sat in the field with the Bodhi tree all afternoon. There was no wind. Butterflies with wings of black with a frilly white edge lifted themselves across the shaded lawn. A shy large bird with a long orange beak peeped at me from behind a tree. Smaller brownish birds pecked in the grass, disappearing as their heads bent down then reappearing as they sprung high above the grass to another place, whence they disappeared again. Their activity was mesmerising, comical, beautiful.

38

Rabindranath Tagore, On the Edges of Time, 2nd Edition ed. (Viswa Bharati Kolkata: Kumkum Bhattacharya, 1958), 75.

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The complex structure of the tree with its hanging roots and twisted trunks was a challenging subject. A gardener came and asked for a cigarette and then sat by, looking on at my work. I sketched this tiny slim man with his sharply defined and square-jawed face, and thought how much harder a task it had been to draw the tree, to follow its ever undulating lines and forms. As I drew I tried to imitate for the gardener the songs of all the birds I had been hearing at dawn so that I could ask him their names. I struggled but he recognised them in just a few notes, and I thought, he knows them like family. Being able to finally sit with the tree and make drawings was an experience resonating with that of sketching the carved doors in Old Delhi. In this case my sense with sketching was not only as a form of witnessing but of asserting the right to access the tree. I found myself consumed with distress at the excising of the tree from the life of the university, and with the idea that a tree could be imprisoned. The process of gaining access to the tree had connected me with students and staff who expressed their own concerns about the enclosure and what this symbolised in terms of breaking with the Tagore ethos. I was reminded of my experiences in Hunchy, Queensland, Australia, whereby my practice had brought me into a contested context that I could question and negotiate through painting. As I sat, experiencing the magic of the place, its coolness and quietude, I thought how the trees with their canopy created its climate, gave shade, shelter, and food. It was common knowledge that one hundred years ago when old Tagore first meditated here, this area had been barren. What did he experience here that gave him the impulse to grow and nurture trees? Where has that relationship that humans had with trees once gone, such that in present education systems we no longer connect learning and wisdom with trees. It was not only Rabindranath’s tree that had been enclosed. Many of the architects and artists who came to Santiniketan from around the world designed, built, and dedicated to the college exquisite buildings. But in recent years, for reasons said to do with security, these had been enclosed by fences and razor wire. The cages sounded a sinister note in the otherwise idyllic grounds and I began to understand the source of cynicism in Taufik’s voice when he had spoken of Santiniketan. Amitabo, the Patuya Sangit research student, told me that the real reason fences were put in was to prevent villagers from traversing their old pathways through Santiniketan. Like Dhrupadi he was also shocked when I told him how difficult it had become to access the Bodhi Tree, which forms a sacred symbol of the educational and spiritual ethos nurtured by the Tagores.

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The idea that the ‘voice’ of an environment can be percieved through acts of drawing emerged through my encounter with the Bodhi Tree. It was a sense that grew as I sketched the tree with its intricate root system and stem. I had to let go of my mind and allow my eye and hand to communicate and do the work of drawing. In this attentive, still space I ‘heard’ the voice of the tree, which though wordless, was clear. Be, be with me, it said. Only be. ‘Just being’ has never been easy for me without some activity to keep my hands busy. But I suddenly understood why as humans we need trees, why of all places, the Buddha gained enlightenment beneath a tree, and why therefore, the tree was chosen by Tagore as the logical space of learning, and his classroom.

The Statue of Tagore

The statue of Tagore. Detail. Australind

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One day I walked to the end of Santineketan to a place they call Canal Park. At a crossroads I found a stone man sitting with head bowed. The sculpture appeared timeless, unhinged to any particular art movement. The man’s head was carved with long, unkempt hair bound back with threads. His body was large, awkward, and lean. He had the air of a pilgrim with his hands crossed, the palms open in surrender. The way in which his head hung from his frame and his huge legs were crossed suggested exhaustion and a long journey. His feet had been carved into crude stone sandals and stone drapery referred to a humble kind of bag tied using a lungi. I had seen great sculptures but nothing had elicited the feeling that rose as I contemplated this depleted giant. All this I noted and felt as I drew the stone man which I was later told had been made in honour of Rabindranath Tagore, by a local sculptor.

Sculpture of Tagore, encountered in Canal Park, Santiniketan

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Sitakshi and the Pink Skirt

Sitakshi and the pink skirt. Detail. Australind

Sitakshi and the Pink Skirt

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One late afternoon in Kolkata I walked with Taufik and his friends to the Kolkata Art School. A young woman stood in front of the gates staging a one-person protest. She wore a short bright pink skirt and held a placard on which she had written an excerpt from a feminist play, The Vagina Monologues translated into Bangla. Her name was Sitakshi and I asked her what she was doing. “I wore this short skirt, this very bright pink short skirt on purpose because in my city, in my state, the way things are right now, wearing a short skirt or being a woman on its own is like being an object. The reason why people are looking at me right now is because it’s selling…But it’s not their fault because the society itself is very patriarchal.”39 Sitakshi told me how she had spent the day engaged in a stand for freedom, her response to the disturbing escalation of events of rape across Kolkata, by wearing a short pink skirt. She wanted to confront the idea that a woman invited assault through the way she dressed. I looked at the skirt, which I thought was much longer than the miniskirts I had seen worn in Australia and asked how her day had gone. She said that from the moment she had left her house she had suffered harrassment and intimidation from people. She was about to complete her protest at the Art School, exhausted but triumphant. Inspired by Sitakshi’s activities I made paintings about her in the scroll. She had informally listed the days’ activities prompting my decision to create ‘list imagery’. The resulting story thus ran vertically, economising on room in the scroll. I had taken film of Sitakshi as she protested and some days later she called me to ask if she might have photographs of her protest. A local newspaper had run a report denouncing her as a Maoist sympathiser and she wished to respond in a retaliatory article. I was glad to be able to assist, and felt even more inspired to continue working on the paintings that became Sitakshi and the Pink Skirt.

39

Michal Glikson, Sitakshi, (Kolkata Art School Bengal 2013).

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Sitakshi and the Pink Skirt. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field film Sitakshi and the Pink Skirt available to authorised users. (Link)

The College Street Coffee House

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The College Street Coffee House

The College Street Coffee House. Detail. Australind

Taufik and his friends loved to sit at the College Street Coffee House, traditionally a haunt for Kolkata’s intellectual and artistic community since being established in the nineteen forties. It was midday and the Coffee House was filled with people seated at small tables engaged in lively conversations. We had come and were sitting at the back of the cafe beneath a painting of the poet RabindranathTagore, sipping coffee that had been served in small crisp white cups by waiters whose pure white caps were crowned with fans of starched linen, a style as old as the café itself. Some

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of the waiters looked if they too had been with the House since its beginning, whilst others appeared newly hired, and nervous. Drupadhi had a rich alto voice and soon we were tapping hands and feet to her soulful version of Tambourine Man. I had pulled out my scroll and was sketching this pleasant scene when a table of nearby diners took offence to the music and ordered the waiters to silence us. An ugly scene developed during which the guitar was abducted and our group was cast out from the House. I could hardly believe my eyes having become used to the mildness of the Bengali temperament. I was also confused, having been told the Coffee House was traditionally a place where artists would gather. I painted the Coffee House into my scroll in the way that I wanted to remember it—darkened and filled with friends, lovers, and stimulating conversation. I did not paint the way we wandered after the Coffee House debacle until we found a street ice-cream seller and consoled ourselves with fingers of pale creamy kulfi, a traditional form of iccream, dipped from a large metal pot, cut into pieces and served on leaves in the old way. By this time it was night and as we moved I noted whole streets lined with sleeping people. Taxi drivers slept prone on the boots of their cabs, hands folded over tummies, faces turned to the cloudy night sky. Rickshaw wallahs slept balanced like branches across the seats of their cycle carriages. Woman slept curled into the curves of footpaths near shops where the lights made it safer. We passed a mother whose sleeping baby had rolled some way down the footpath and rolled it back gently, as both slept on. These encounters I did paint, sensing in them significant negotiations of belonging, place, and home.

A Woman Washing Her Sari

Woman washing her sari. Australind. Detail

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On the platform of a small station, whilst waiting for a train back to Mednipur and Naya, I noticed a woman drying her sari. Having washed it at the water pump of the station, she had tied one end to a pole and standing several metres away, wrapped from the breast down. To speed the process she was turning slowly towards the pole and then outward, her head topped with a pillow of silver hair disappearing and reappearing in the folds of cloth. Men, for it was mostly men boarding and alighting from the train, walked briskly past, largely ignoring her. Though the woman’s activity must have been commonplace as to go unregarded by local people, her actions struck me as singular and significant. I empathised deeply with her circumstances. But I also found the woman’s actions compelling and inspiring for she was exercising her basic human right to essential resources such as water. I would have liked to sketch the woman as she stood amidst the red and yellow waves of her sari but I hesitated as I felt that this kind of attention would be an imposition and source of discomfort. After some thought I compromised by filming at a distance of about ten metres for one minute. The film assisted me when it came to developing a painting about this singular event by allowing me to reobserve something of its poignancy and poetry.

A woman drying her sari. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field film A woman drying her sari available to authorised users. (Link)

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The Temple of Titli

The temple of Titli. Australind. Detail

One day I was taken to an old temple not far from Naya village, where I was staying with the Chitrakars. This temple was unlike the ornate marble shrines I had visited in the western states of India. It was tiny, beautifully proportioned, and constructed of slim, hand-moulded terracotta bricks. Its walls were round and set with niches in which posed delicate terracotta figurines. The roof was a high, rounded dome, patterned with fine curving lines that reminded one of fingerprints, as if large hands had descended from the sky and imprinted the clay. Floral offerings had been left on its perfectly swept little steps, whilst overhead the branches of very large trees shaded the temple in a cool green light. Thousands of butterflies or titli with lemon, black and white, pink, and lavender wings flitted through in the shadows and hovered about the temple and its slender, earth-coloured pillars. With exceptions, I had not felt pulled to make images about man-made structures but something about this one, so lovely, so concealed, so evidently loved by local devotees, and the prevalence the butterflies, spoke to me. Though small in scale, the structure was complex and I strained to capture its proportions and details. I spent a great deal of time developing the painting in which I strove to represent both the architecture, and its sense of peace and mystery. With my qalam I covered the roof with fine curving lines in the way that I remembered, wondering all the while about the technical achievement of these on the steep and curving dome.

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Rupa’s Teashop

In Rupa’s teashop. Australind. Detail

In Naya village, Rupa ran her tiny teashop, sometimes with help from her husband. I developed a habit of sitting inside the shadowy hut, drinking chai, sketching, and watching Rupa as she worked. I was curious about her for it was uncommon to find a teashop being run by a woman. Rupa appeared happy, in control of her domain of boiling pots of chai and frying mountains of samosas. She would place cup after cup in front of me with a smile and never a trace of disapproval even though I was prone to pulling out and smoking cigarettes, which for a woman in Naya constituted a somewhat racy action. I had drunk chai with many friendly chai wallahs, but in Rupa’s teashop I experienced a singularly precious sense of acceptance—prompting my painting of it and of its owner, in the scroll.

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Biplab, the Revolutionary Homeopath

Biplab, Nirmalendu and I. Australind. Detail

Because there was no internet reception in Naya every few weeks I took a train to Kolkata to check email and take the opportunity to stock up on batteries or other

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needed items. My migraines kept returning and so Taufik and Pobhitro took me to meet Biplab Das, a homeopath. Biplab was about forty, but with his round face and eyes that sparkled behind glasses thick as bottle bases, he looked very young. He loaded me with small bottles of pills accompanied by complex instructions. The names of some of the medicines sounded like poems, others like horrible diseases and unfamiliar with homeopathy, I was sceptical. But they worked like a charm and I was soon up and back on the streets with my scroll. I was so impressed that I continued returning to Biplab as in Bengal I seemed to be constantly battling all manner of ailments. From gastro-enteritis to blood poisoning from mosquito bites, to a virulent flu-like infection caught on the metro, Biplab patiently diagnosed, prescribed medicine, and cured them all. The name Biplab means ‘revolution’ in Bangla, and it suited him as in his profession he was something of revolutionary as unlike many homeopaths he willingly worked with patients taking alopathic treatment. Biplab’s life was different to that of Taufik and his circle, for he supported his father and himself which meant that though he loved art and music, he didn’t have the freedom or time to join them in their meanderings. I found Biplab’s patience and kindness a balm, and we became good friends. He encouraged me to come and stay whenever I visted Kolkata thus over time paintings developed as I sought to describe what I got to know of Bipblab and his father and their life in Phoolbagan. Bipblab’s father Nirmalendu was as different to his son as a bird from a bear. As I sketched him sitting at his brazier, I thought how frail and gnome-like he was with his pale complexion, aquiline nose, and large melancholic eyes. Nirmalendu did not speak but he would make me tea, black tea without milk, containing sugar and black salt. Our communications were such comfortable silences punctuated by the sounds of tea sipping, rain pounding or dripping on tin roofs, and classical Bengali music which Nirmalendu loved. Each time I visit Biplab he treats my eternal string of health complaints with medicines extracted from a huge ancient leather doctor’s bag, and abiding patience. Like my computer that is wont to overheating and sending out electric shocks, I seem to have become dry, brittle, and raddled with issues. I am just forty-five but lately I feel so tired, so much older. I paint lying down now on the cool floor, often falling asleep on the scroll. I sense this tiredness coming also from the strain of living in a different culture. It seems strange to me that although India as a terrain to me holds familiarity, each day finds me newly overwhelmed and feeling bombarded by signs, signals, metaphors that demand decoding. The painting developed slowly; I sought to capture something of Bipblab and Nirmalendu’s home which seemed to have once been part of an old fort. Nearby stood a square tower covered with climbing lilies. A walled niche in the courtyard held a manger suggesting that perhaps the place had been a stable. Water was drawn using an iron pump more than a hundred years old. An only child, Biplab had been born in this set of rooms. They contained most of his memories of childhood and of his mother who died when he was twelve. In India leases are still often inherited and pass from generation to generation. This was the case with Bipblab and his father whose landlord had been a close friend. The

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problem was that Phoolbagan as an area was undergoing radical development, which meant that land prices had risen. The old landlord had died recently such that Biplab and his father were now engaged in a legal battle with his children who wished to terminate the lease and sell the plot to developers. Biplab had managed to get a temporary injunction to sale of the apartment, but he was very worried. Not only would the new high rise flats be financially beyond his reach, he had been unable to find another rental in the area. He explained that he needed to stay in this part of Kolkata because reputations were created by local people and word of mouth. No one would come to an unknown homeopath and he feared losing his patients even through moving just one suburb away. Biplab and his father never cooked except to boil tea or broth on a small burner. Nirmalendu’s breakfast was tea, Biplab’s a cigarette. Their lunches and dinners came in tiffins from a delivery service and they employed an elderly lady to sweep the floor, wash clothes, saucers, and cups. Above one of the doors was a tin containing muri (puffed rice) and another holding a few biscuits but apart from these the home held no food. In this respect it was quite unlike any other home I had stayed in. Sometimes a mixup meant that the dinner tiffin didn’t arrive. I would offer to fetch our supper from the bazaar, glad for the walk through the market to the dhaba that sold Biplab’s favourite dal tarka dispersed in small clay pots.40 I would stop to buy fresh roti, made of soft, white rice-flour from a man who rolled the chapatis faster than his young apprentice could cook them. The journey took me past a temple. I loved to watch evening devotions and the seamless way that people hurrying home from work would pause, offer clasped hands and a quick prayer, and continue on their way. This was the hour of donation and people would collect at the temple to beg. I became familiar with the sight of a group of women who positioned themselves advantageously for the handing of alms. One evening on a dinner errand I brought my scroll and camera with me. The priests kindly permitted me to perch on the temple steps in order to sketch. I watched as people came and went and waited for alms. An old man had placed himself close to the temple and he caught my attention. I began to sketch him and he glanced at me, his mouth crooked up at the corner in a slight smile. A dog nosing around came close to the man who hit it hard. The dog looked at him in bewilderment before backing off. I began sketching the dog. Then my eye and pencil moved to attend to the group of women to my right. At this point people began gathering to look at what I was doing, and soon their bodies obscured my view. Unsure of what to do, I remained seated. Then several of the women who I had begun to sketch pushed through the crowd to view their portraits in the scroll. They shooed the others away and sat with me, thus I was able to complete their portraits, and to ask them their names which I noted beside the drawings.

40

Tarka refers to a process of removing a portion of boiled dal from the pot, frying this in ghee enriched with masalas and garlic, after which it is transferred back to the pot where it imbues its flavour.

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Phoolbagan folk. Australind. Detail

Sketching outside the temple. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field film Sketching outside the temple in Phoolbagan available to authorised users. (Link)

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Human

Human. Detail. Australind

One day Biplab and I were travelling in one of the large ancient yellow taxicabs that service the city of Kolkata.41 Whenever the traffic came to a standstill children would run into the lanes to try to sell things to those sitting at the windows of cars. A boy of about eight years old came to my open window with chocolate bars. His eyes were sunken, as if pushed back into his face with much crying. His expression and demeanour reminded me of professional boxers I had seen, after a lifetime of being punched. I wanted to weep, to put my arms around him, to do something to comfort him. I reached down to get money but he moved on through the traffic so quickly with his plastic jar that I when I craned my neck out of the window I could not catch sight of him. Biplab picked him out again, now far down the lane of cars saying, “There he is, see his T-shirt that says “human” on the back.” This boy I remembered through a painting, a portrait drawn from memory. In the course of this I had an impulse to paint his feet facing backward. Doing so I made free with symbolism that is contextual to the portrayal of a mythological creature or demon called pichelpairi. Pichelpairi are said to be the spirits of women whose deaths have occurred through family neglect. Depictions of pichelpairi can be found in Mughal miniature paintings. These show rather frightening women, half-naked, with flying black hair and backward facing feet. I remember the day I experienced a thrill of recognition seeing a pichelpairi in an illustration from the 41 The story Biplab the Revolutionary Homeopath is located in the digitised version of Australind scroll II Australindopak Archive, accompanying this book.

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Shahnameh. The symbolism of the backward facing feet suggested to me ideas of looking back at trauma or wounds of the past. Although pichelpairi were traditionally and archetypally associated with wounded femininity, as I saw it, little boys were as vulnerable and potentially as neglected as girls, hence my decision to depict the candyseller with backward facing feet.

With Chitrakars in Naya At the beginning of this book I shared how I first encountered the folk art form Patuya Sangit whilst a student in Baroda. Patuya Sangit means literally “painting song” but when the artists came to exhibit at the school, their purpose was exhibition and selling of scrolls as art objects rather than performing. Thus I had yet to learn of these other significant dimensions to their storytelling practice. As a painter wanting to take my practice into more transient contexts, my attention had been caught by the form of the scroll paintings themselves which suggested a portable, durable way of painting. It was as I began moving with scrolls, making paintings, and sharing my work with people on the street, that I began thinking more deeply about Patuya Sangit and its capacity for bringing together archetypal ideas of the wanderer, artist, and storyteller. Travelling to the village of Naya in West Bengal my idea was to research the practice of Patuya Sangit with a community of Chitrakars, which is the name by which this artisan caste goes. One of the things I was looking to understand was the special dual-religious framework embodied by these artists. As storytellers they were often negotiating religious and faith divides and an aspect of this framework involved the artists taking both Hindu and Islamic names. As a strategy this gave them the capacity to tell stories for their Hindu neighbours as well as the wider multifaith community. My observations of this framework suggested that the vocational aspect of storytelling overrode the kinds of tribal and cultural distinctions that ordinarily divided people and communities. Ensconced in this identity the Chitrakar artists were able to travel into significant spaces of others such as for example their domestic realms, for the purposes of sharing stories through performances with their scrolls. As a way this resonated for me, reminding me for example of the vocational storytellers of Yuin as described by the senior artist Vida Brown. There are several Chitrakar communities in West Bengal, some are practising Hindus, and some are Muslim. The Chitrakar community of Naya village are Muslim and comprise about one hundred families. Their mohalla is ensconced within the tiny village, where people live closely, grouped according to faith and caste. Naya lies four hours west of Kolkata in the district of Pingla Block, Mednipur. The train from Kolkata does not pass through the town and as I was on a tight budget, I did not follow the instructions in my guidebook, but caught public transport in the form of the local bus, filled to bursting with passengers.

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In Bengal the monsoon with its heat, and humidity made for challenges in terms of research. However as illness had disrupted my schedule, I had little choice but to continue on. I arrived in Naya on a hot, rainy afternoon in the company of Amitabo, a research student from Santiniketan also wishing to examine aspects of the Patuya tradition. My original intention had been to stay in a hostel some three kilometres away from the Chitrakars’ village, however upon being introduced to Rani and Shyamsunder Chitrakar, I was invited to stay with their family. I was thrilled about this invitation which would enable me to be with the artists and to learn about their lifeworld in proximity. However the next day Amitabo, who had agreed to assist as an interpreter for several weeks, decided to leave unexpectedly for Kolkata from whence he did not return for six weeks. In a village where English was hardly spoken, observation, absorption, and osmosis thus became key to my experience. One of the questions I had held as I travelled concerned the way that the journey might yield paintings that would be cross-cultural in content and form. Of the experience of straddling cultures Australian artist Kim Mahood has said, “it’s a curious process having your mind colonised incrementally by a different way of seeing”. During fieldwork I found my understanding of this dynamic increasing as I began absorbing influences and instinctively pouring these into my paintings. As a process, osmosis may have been happening throughout fieldwork but particular understandings about the nature of this process arrived for me during the time that I stayed in Naya village because of my lack of Bangla and the general lack of spoken English.42 The aesthetic of the Chitrakar’s enclave in Naya added dimensions to my experience of their world. The idea to paint the enclave had been an initiative of Banglanatak, an organisation focused with supporting Bengali folk art forms. The Chitrakars had done the paintings with the result that their little village was like a shrine to the Patuya Sangit artform. Each home and structure was muralled outside and within with scenes from scroll paintings and local folklore, or brilliant and beautiful patterns. Animals and characters of all kinds flew, swam, slithered across walls making life in their village something like inhabiting a life-size children’s picture book.

Culture, Immersion, and Food I remember how I began to grasp the significance of food as an economic and cultural divider in Bengal when a student in Santiniketan told me that the key social determinant was whether a family ate one, two, or three meals a day. In the Australia of my childhood, though my family had not been well-off, lack of food was never an issue. His words opened my eyes, helping me to understand why in Bengal I sensed abiding preoccupations with food, and food security.

42

5.

Kim Mahood, “In the Gap between Two Ways of Seeing,” Griffith Review Autumn, no. 23 (2009):

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I also began to understand how collective memories of times when there was not enough food prevailed amongst people of all castes and classes, through conversations and snippets of information that I picked up. Slowly, as I looked, listened. he life and significance of food together with other socio-cultural and political aspects of Bengali society found their way into the paintings I made during my time in Bengal, and especially Naya village.

Rice eyes. Australind. Detail

Rice, I came to learn, had great significance as a food in Bengal. Rice was almost always present at meals in the city, and more so in the village. It was served boiled, steamed, immersed in water, puffed, ground, cooked into chapattis, as a base for gravies, and as a binder for sweets. Significantly, the first occasion on which a child ate rice was celebrated. Marriage and prenuptual ceremonies as I discovered involved feeding the bride copious amounts of kheer—crushed white rice cooked in sugar, milk and ghee. If a husband was neglectful or unfaithful, women refered to this indirectly, saying “he does not come home to eat rice”. I also noted rice being offered in lieu of money, for example when puffed and raw rice was poured into the Chitrakar artists sacks after they had performed for their neighbours. And though the house might run out of a range of ingredients for which Susuma or Rani would duck out to the local market, rice was always there, raw in a sack at the back of the kitchen, and puffed in a blue plastic barrel from which the children often filled their bowls, adding milk for a snack. Rice was always sitting somewhere, cooked, or cooling in a clay pot on the upam (clay stove), or soaking in preparation. Ponderings of rice filled out my scroll in the form of drawings about it and its place in Bengali culture.

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Naya was surrounded by thriving rice fields and yet I sensed anxieties about rice. People became very worried when their household stores fell below a certain level. As I learned, there were vivid collective memories of major famines during which hundreds of thousands of people starved. One famine had occurred in the mid nineteenth century when the British government deliberately hoarded rice with the intention of starving the native population into submission. Another famine had occurred early in the twentieth century when rice crops failed. In Naya the significance of rice meant that it was heaped upon my plate as a sign of care and respect for the guest. I was expected to reciprocate by eating with gusto, however as I did not digest rice well, I would try to refuse. My response however was met with great bewilderment, concern, and disappointment. I came to the conclusion that rice was so important that to not eat any of this significant food was insensitive and so I surrendered and despite the discomfort, ate rice.

Sleeping Chitrakars and fish. Australind. Detail

Performing Stories for Other Families I learned that Rani, Shyamsundar, and other Chitrakar artists performed more at conferences and festivals nowadays than for their neighbours but they kindly put on

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a few local performances so that I could experience how their work had traditionally taken place. Though they were only performing for the neighbours, Rani and Shyam took trouble readying themselves, carefully selecting scrolls to take, arguing about which stories the families would enjoy most. Whilst Rani pressed her clothes, Shyam tied a lunghi to make a cloth bag in which to carry the scrolls. Rani disparaged the bag saying that it made them look like beggars. But Shyam was adamant, saying that Chitrakars had always used such bags to carry their scrolls. We rode in a wagon attached to a bicycle, curving along quiet, cool and shaded paths. Arriving at an enclave, Rani called out in the resounding voice of a seasoned actress that there was going to be a show and ‘everyone come out, come out now!’. When we entered a Hindu quarter, people emerged from their cottages to follow us into a large courtyard. There Rani unfurled scrolls and sung stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana sagas. At particular passages she would point or gesture to imagery in the scroll, which being large and brightly coloured, were visible from a distance of some feet. The Patuya scrolls borrow in style from Kalighat, a bold and cartoon-like genre that developed in the eighteenth century in South Calcutta where souvenir paintings became popular with pilgrims to the temple of Kali, and from which the genre takes its name.43 At the end of each set of performances the women of the houses brought rice, muri, vegetables, and coins. As they poured these into a sack Rani thanked them saying, “Like this we have been coming to you for a long time to sing and tell scrolls and always you sustain us with food.” I was fascinated that the Chitrakars put aside religious predilections, for example by postponing prayers, to serve their calling as storytellers. It showed me that they shared a history of trust with their Hindu neighbours. It was significant that the Chitrakars were continuing to be facilitated with the telling of the sacred stories in a country where the Hindu-Muslim religious divide was/is being increasingly exploited to generate distrust and violence. By choosing to not give their loyalty to Islam or to Hinduism the Chitrakars tread an increasingly insecure path between these key religions. They marginalise themselves, uninvited to partake of whatever economic privileges each group has gained for itself. Whatever the religion they are born to, their identity is not caught up there but lies in their role as Chitrakars, artists who must not take sides. The paradigm they occupied, the space of the storyteller, spoke to me, as here the artist was neither outside nor inside, but at a threshold between which cultural dichotomies become suspended.44 The Chitrakars affirmed this threshold by invoking the philosophy of Lalun Phokir, an eighteenth-century Bengali mystic. The songs of Lalun Phokir probe the contradictions he saw in Indian society and question the dichotomies of self/other and gender, 43

Ghosh, P. (2000). Kalighat Painting from Nineteenth Century Calcutta in Maxwell Sommerville’s ‘Ethnological East Indian Collection’. Expedition, 42(3). 44 Korom, Frank J., and Paul J Smutko. “Village of Painters; Narrative Scrolls from West Bengal.” Reference and Research Book News 22, no. 2 (2007). 22, 40.

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caste and faith distinctions. Though their storytelling practices were anchored in very specific roles, and though they did not wander as I did but moved from point to point with specific destinations in mind, I felt that we were linked through the vocation of storytelling, and in the way that life was entwined with painting. The Chitrakar’s practice thus provided me with a significant example and guide as I sought to work with the stories entrusted to me.

Performing for local families. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field film Performing for local families available to authorised users. (Link)

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Paintmaking in the Home In Naya the work of making paint was often done by the women artists. I saw pigments being made using ingredients from their kitchens, kitchen gardens and neighbouring areas in the form of plants, leaves, fruits, vegetables, local clays, charcoals, and soots. One day Susuma walked to a nearby garden to pick a plant that she said would give a soft blue colour. Another day I watched her collect cow dung for a different shade of blue. She would wade into the fish pond and gather fine milk-white clay from its silty depths which, mixed with gum, would yield white pigment. Another day she visited some trees on the main road for simpata leaves and with these Rani made a rich reddish-brown paint, a lengthy process involving much grinding of the leaves on her large flat grinding stone. I watched the colour emerge from pulp she squeezed into a bowl, which she mixed with a little soot to create a warm black for the outlines of her imagery in scrolls. The utensils used to grind pigments were the same ones used for making the family’s meals. The space in which the artists ate and slept in the day was the space in which they painted. The worn out saris of Rani and Susuma became material for backing new scrolls, their colours and and patterns making these durable and beautiful. I noticed the daughters of the house, little Rupa and Shampa watching, taking in the ways of their mother and grandmother, and helping in numerous ways when asked. Shyam also spent time with Shampa showing her how to paint; how to make the fine black outlines of images, how to fill these with colour when dry. But the organic, continual nature of the lessons Shampa imbibed as a daughter of the house with the women who ran it fascinated me particularly as an understated, implicit, and time-rich form of art education.

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3 Australia and India: The Second Scroll: Australind Making Paint in Naya. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field film Making Paint in Naya available to authorised users. (Link)

The Benares sari. Australind. Detail

When I had been in the village about a month, one of the village daughters, fifteen year old Soniya Chitrakar, asked if I would film her wedding. In the process I found myself wholly immersed in this life-changing event. I followed Soniya and her sisters through various stages of preparation that began with the buying of her trousseau and ended with the escorting of the bride and groom to his family home. Filming this event, my mind was working overtime to comprehend the significance of things in the absence of cultural knowledge and of language translation. As I witnessed Soniya through her rituals and ceremonies, I saw her transformation but could only sense its layers. I found myself pouring these experiences into paintings, working during cooler nights, trying to put down what I percieved as the significances in these events.

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Soniya’s Halud. Still from field documentary

The women pour oil over a pestle into Soniya’s hair. Soniya is changing. Australind. Detail

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In Naya my thinking was influenced and taken over in ways that felt gradual, subtle, and organic. Surrounded by the Chitrakars visual vocabulary, their language begin to enter my paintings but in a way that felt very subtle and organic. During the day I could hear songs in the form of lullabies to children, accompaniments to cooking and painting, immersing me in the sound as well as the sight of Patuya Sangit. At night when the courtyard was peppered with black shadows people would flit across to each other’s homes. Sometimes dramatic fights would break out. Sometimes the whole village came out to take sides and things would become loud and chaotic. One day I found shards of glass glinting up from the dust of the courtyard. I didn’t realise they were fragments of smashed bangles until I missed the bangles that Susuma usually wore on her arms. One day I watched as her husband came into the room where we were painting and in front of all, rubbed his foot all over her head. Susuma laughed but I felt something was wrong. The feeling was confirmed a few weeks later in Santiniketan when I showed the film to my translator who gasped at the derogation explicit in her husband’s action. Sometimes Rani settled into a plastic chair in my room to immerse in Bengali soap operas. These invariably featured pale faced actors in stereotypical dramas. The extravagantly wealthy settings of the soaps irritated me. Such lifestyles polarised with and seemed to devalue the way of life in the village that I was trying to paint and which felt to me vital and ecological.

A detail of the Fish Wedding mural in Rani and Shyam’s home

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When I began painting fish forms that resembled figures in the house mural, a version of a popular story called Fish Wedding I wondered if this were a consequence of having been living, eating and sleeping in front of the painting over months. Another influence that came in during my time with the Chitrakars was collaboration on paintings, which I often saw happening in families and especially on large scrolls. For some time I kept my own scroll separate, and then at some stage it felt natural to invite Susuma’s daughters Seema and Rupa Chitrakar to work with me on paintings. In this way as well as others, painting in Naya showed how being immersed and embedded promoted osmosis of culture, and how this manifested in my painting.

Seema Chitrakar painting in the Australind scroll

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Seema’s painting in the scroll next to her portrait. Australind. Detail

Shampa of Baidyabati In Bengal if you begin telling a long story people say, “So, you’re telling us a Ramayan?” This sometimes happened as I shared stories from my scroll. But unlike stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata those in the scroll had no morals or messages. As diaries, the scrolls were temporal works, made up of moments that lacked an overarching or continuous narrative. These micro-narratives ended either because I decided to stop, or because something else beyond my control, such as the paper ending, or a spell of illness halted me. Many of the paintings I made were about processing powerful experiences that coincided with my underlying themes of home/lessness and the yearning to belong. Episodes of incapacitating illness allowed me to experience instances of kindness and even senses of belonging as people took me into their homes and cared for me. Making portraits of people who looked after me when I was ill was a way of remembering and acknowledging such acts. And sometimes in the process their own stories emerged and prompted paintings, films and/or sound compositions. I had to travel from Naya to Kolkata every two or three weeks to check my email and in the city I always seemed to come down with some illness. On one occasion I was travelling with Amitabo, the Ph.D. student I had met at Santiniketan to his home in Baidyabati, an outer burg. Arriving, I broke into a sweat and fell to the floor with violent cramps, after which came a high fever.

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Amitabo’s older sister Shampa took on the job of caring for me using medicines prescribed by Blipblap. These worked quickly and after twelve hours the bout was mercifully over. The experience of emerging from delirium seemed to increase my sensitivity to air, sounds, textures and voices such that when I could sit up, I found myself looking at my surroundings with great interest.

Shampa of Baidyabati. Detail. Australind

At first, being ill felt like a setback. But this feeling evaporated as I became fascinated with observing Shampa in her home, which I learned was where most of her life took place. As soon as I could, I pulled myself to the kitchen where I sat watching Shampa cook. I would observe her for hours, mesmerised with the detail of her work with preparing and cooking meals. Days would pass with the grinding of spices, the fine mincing garlic and ginger, chopping vegetables and kneading of dough, all by hand. I watched Shampa grinding meat for hours on her black stone block, that I now understood as a fixture of households in Bengal. Then I watched Shampa as she washed the dishes, walls, and floors of the house, washed and hung up the clothes of

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six people, went out and came back with vegetables and other foods for the next day, cared for her father, and mended clothes. She spoke very little English and though I had some Hindi, I had no Bangla to speak of. Yet a bond developed between us. Perhaps it was the bond that forms between patient and carer. Sometimes Shampa would sit back from her work and close her eyes for a moment. I would reach out and touch her feet, and say in my broken Hindi that she was working too hard. I asked if I could help but she would not let me. When I was strong enough I got out my camera and asked if I could film her as she worked. She shrugged but she never asked me to stop filming, even during arguments with her family. I sensed Shampa’s unhappiness in an intuitive way. She rarely went out except to fetch cooking ingredients. I only ever saw her wearing shapeless old house dresses. She waited on everybody but nobody waited on her or gave her help with her work. The family would come home, eat the food she had cooked, sleep in beds she had made, put on clothes she had washed, dried, ironed and folded. Then they would eat again, and leave for school or other pursuits. I never saw Shampa take time out for herself. She might put the television on to watch soap operas but her hands would be busy defoliating bundles of coriander, spinach, or mint, shelling peas, or ironing, or mending. Shampa liked the home-grown Bangla soap operas. She would sit in front of her pea mountains, shelling, in thrall to the plump, white-faced actresses decked with golden jewellery and silken saries, as they sallied around the modern Indian version of a palace or mansion. The new bride persecuted by a cruel mother-in-law or sister, or the beautiful, dutiful, neglected wife maltreated by her adulterous husband were common themes. I wondered if Shampa saw herself in these stories. In the kitchen I had noticed a curious line of dark red marks, handprints running along the wall and over the top of the kitchen door. The looked was as if someone with bloodied hands had pulled themselves along the wall and through the door. I learned they had been made by Shampa and Amitabo’s mother when she was alive as part of a ritual for Durga, the mother goddess. I wondered if the prints gave comfort to Shampa, as if her mother watched over her from the walls in which she too had possibly spent much of her life. Up on the roof was a little room to which Amitabo often disappeared to meditate. The room was crammed with figurines, masks, pictures, dolls, and icons, representations of some of the three hundred and thirty three million gods and goddesses of the Hindu religious pantheon. As I slowly looked around the room I wondered about these gods whose smiles seemed to polarise with the life of the mortals downstairs. The day I was due to leave I gave Shampa some small gifts, things for herself such as scented soap, face cream, perfume. Then when everyone had left for the day she came to me and began speaking, then weeping in a torrent of Hindi and Bangla. I gathered from what she told me that her husband never came home, never sent money and didn’t love her. I asked if she would like to come to Santiniketan for a visit, as a kind of holiday, in thanks for her gift of care. For a moment Shampa’s face lit up and I thought she might accept. But her smile dropped then and she shook her head. How would the family cope without her?

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Many of the stories that came into the scrolls came there as people shared with me, because as they said, I was a foreigner and “therefore would understand”. Perhaps this was why Shampa had felt able to reveal her feelings to me, also as I was leaving and with me, her words. Perhaps also, as I hope, it was because she had seen in me someone who empathised, a witness to her life. Shampa’s portrait added dimensions to the themes in my scroll as although she had a home and a family to which she belonged, within this sphere she felt uncherished. I hoped that things would get better for her, and visualising this hope, covered her image with tiny painted butterflies. Though in Bengali culture titli are seen as spirits of the departed, in other cultures including the one in which I grew up, the butterfly is percieved as a symbol of transformation, and this was the interpretation I chose.

Shampa of Baidyabati. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field film Shampa of Baidyabati available to authorised users. (Link)

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The Kashmiri Kowboy

The Kashmiri Kowboy. Detail. Australind

I had just finished giving a workshop at Kala Bhavana, the fine arts faculty in Santiniketan when I went down with another bout of gastric illness. Sajjad, a sculptor who had begun teaching in the faculty that year, propped me on the back of his scooter and took me on a painful ride to the nearest hospital where I received a drip containing painkiller that put me to sleep. When I awoke I found my sandals had been stolen. The incident instilled in me a wariness of hospitals, which I later dissovered was one shared by many in India, and also in Pakistan. It was then that I learned that most families never leave their relative alone for a minute, even in expensive private clinics, for fear of what might happen to, or be taken from, the patient. This time the gastic was severe as to require time off from my research. I rested for two weeks at Sajjad’s before deciding that I was well enough to return to Kolkata where I wanted further treatment from Biplab. Unfortunately at Biplab’s the gastric returned and he grew concerned that I needed supervision which he could not provide. He was extremely anxious about a law in India of which I was unaware, and which states that if a foreigner dies in the home of an Indian citizen, or even in a taxi with them, then the accompanying citizen and/or taxi driver will be held responsible. But when he suggested I enter a private hospital I refused on the basis of my experience at Santiniketan.

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In Biblab’s home I lay prone on the floor, unable to rise. I could see the feet of Biplab and his friends gathered round me, trying desperately to persuade me to enter the hospital. I drew those feet later on in the scroll, so as to remember that feeling of powerlessness and of having become an imposition. When I continued to refuse to move, in despair Biblab called Sajjad who offered for me to recover at his home in Santiniketan where he had a maid who would be able to stay with me. He came to fetch me and somehow I managed to get up, move out of the house and follow him onto a train. I lay in Sajjad’s little house for two more weeks, just watching light filter through the windows and Sajjad going about his life. I called him the ‘Kashmiri Kowboy’ because he loved spaghetti westerns and cowboy hats. When not watching films, he would curate his handsome collection of cigarette lighters, or design and hand-stitch leather wallets. Each afternoon it was his habit to brew cup after cup of heartstopping Vietnamese dark-roasted coffee before turning at dusk to his real poison, a virulent local brew of whisky. His maid Tulsi, was a cheerful local woman who came daily to cook the Kashmiri dal and rice on which Sajjad and I lived, shake out the mats, and turn a blind eye to all else. Around the house Sajjad likes to wander, wearing the traditional Bengali lunghi, a checkered or plaid length of cloth tied like a dhoti or sarong. In my weakened state I notice things slowly, details emerge and present themselves as if in a dream. I see two large oddly shaped birthmarks on the Kowboy’s back. The marks niggle me, staying on my mind until one day I rouse myself to ask him about them. The Kashmiri Kowboy is sitting with glass of whisky in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He tells me his story. At 20 Sajjad started an artist collective in Srinagar, and they held exhibitions and performances. They were considered radical and political, and were banned on the pretext of fostering anti-Indian sentiments. As warnings, Sajjad was kidnapped several times by the Indian police and beaten. But on the last occasion they kept him for two days, beating him, and then torturing him by ironing his kidneys. After this they hung him by a noose, and then flung his body on the ground, thinking him dead. But he wasn’t dead. He woke up after some hours and crawled in the darkness on his elbows across the town to his home. When he could, he fled Kashmir, first to Thailand and then some years later to the soft, green, quiet of Santiniketan, where nothing ever happens except the rain. It can never be too quiet or too boring for me, he would say. Sajjad’s story shocked me. I found it compelling but I hesitated for some time before asking his permission to work with his story. When he said yes, I began the

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process by making a portrait of him which developed into an allegory that I called The Kashmiri Kowboy. Processes of making The Kashmiri Kowboy paintings began as I was living with Sajjad. This allowed me to perceive some of the ways in which these experiences continued to impact his life. Sajjad was often anxious, and to anaesthetise himself he used a strong locally brewed spirit. When drinking he would enter dark moods and turn on whoever was near with verbal brutality. He never remembered these episodes, and I watched as his friends consistently forgave and forgot these outbursts. One day however he turned on me and I realised that the time had come for me to leave, and to allow him to be alone. I had grown fond of Sajjad, for he had given me for a while a home and a haven and wished I could do more to support him. I left and found a small hostel, where I lay on the floor trying to make sense of the experience through paintings. I depicted myself in the act of walking away holding my head in my hand, treading on painted nails. I had to accept that I could do little except express care from a distance, over the phone.

The Two Birds Many experiences, such as my time with Sajjad, evoked autobiographical paintings and sound recordings. Making these allowed for a way of standing outside myself, as witness to events, interactions or experiences. Autobiography as I came to learn was integral to sustaining peripatetic painting because of the emotional outlet it provided. During those times when I found myself negotiating challenging experiences or situations and was unable to contact a friend due to lack of phone or internet coverage, different time zones, or simply because I could not find words to express what was going on, painting ‘out and through’ became a key way of coping. The idea of autobiography corresponds to the idea of the two birds described in the preface of this book and in which the artist observes and immerses in life. As a paradigm I found it helpful during my travels as observation and diarising became a way to make sense of my life. I embraced the scroll as a space of ownership and experimentation, becoming braver about voicing my thoughts. I took my diary seriously, investing much labour into entries as I reconstructed and reconfigured events of significance to me. I may have found the act of rereading my scrolls “…a

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moving experience, both pleasurable and terrible…” but as testimonies to my journey they became invaluable, helping me to remember where I came from, what I had gone through, and what I witnessed, and was allowed to share of others’ lives.45

Dinner with Sanchayang

Dinner with Sanchyang. Australind. Detail

In India and Pakistan the significance of food continued to impress me through experiences with individuals, families, and communities. Culture and history, personal and societal surfaced through the food that people cooked in their homes and through food served in the street. Stopping to sample the latter was more

45

Philippe Lejeune, On Diary (Honolulu, HI, USA: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 43.

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about steeping myself in the life of places than about satisfying hunger, an activity interwoven with wandering and sketching. Food of the house or ghar ka khana held a special place in the hearts of people. I found the kitchens of people I stayed with fascinating with their plethora of ingredients, their smell redolent of the spices, dals, and flours used. Traditional equipment also fascinated me. Kitchens were social places where preparation and cooking took place on the floor accompanied by conversations between cooks, which made them exciting places to sit, watch, sketch and film. Quite a few of the films I made came through observing the life of kitchens. Most of my experiences of home food involved women for whom cooking was an occupation and a preoccupation. When Sanchayang Ghosh, artist and teacher at Santiniketan Kala Bhavana Arts faculty invited me to dinner, busy as he was I anticipated a simple meal. But as Sanchayang kept disappearing into the kitchen until a veritable banquet had appeared, about eight traditional Bengali dishes, I realised I was in the presence of a serious cook. The scents wafting from the dishes brought my stomach, of late plagued with illnesses, to life. Unlike dhaba-style food, Sanchayang’s cooking was pure ghar ka khana - not too oily or salty, full of care and nutrition, but also with flavours that leapt together and sang. He told me that he had learned to cook this way because his mother had encouraged him to spend time with her in the kitchen, which for a boy was unusual. The painting I made was as much about remembering this experience of receiving nurturance as it was an ode, mythologising the talents of the cook.

Kolkata to Kanpur It was time to leave Kolkata for Delhi. This time I was able to book a seat on a train that would take me across the north of India through the states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. On my way I intended to stop in the city of Kanpur. I wanted to visit a historic site where a battle had taken place during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, a site that the painter William Simpson had also visited and made paintings in 1859. As the train passed through Bihar, the land became arid and the air turned dry and cold. I hadn’t booked a hotel and upon arriving wandered down the main street in search of a place to stay. After the warmth and humidity of Kolkata, Kanpur felt

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like a different country. Grey haze banded the air and though I had yet to learn of Kanpur’s highly toxic textile and leather industries, I sensed the signatures of the industrial city. My focus however was narrow, singular, and delved one historical aspect of the place. This was the Rebellion of 1857 and the massacre at Sati Chaura ghat—which from that point had become known in the english-speaking world as ‘Massacre Ghat’.

Sati Chaura—Massacre Ghat

Sati Chaura/Massacre Ghat. Australind. Detail

The Indian Mutiny represented a moment in time in which Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs aligned to express their resentment of the Raj. They did so in response to the order to use bullets coated with beef and pork fat, contact with which contravened these respective faiths. The lack of understanding on the part of the British created solidarity amongst their native soldiers culminating in their united stand against the British and subsequent rebellion. The battle of Kanpur, then known as Cawnpore, had been the first of many battles fought during the uprising, and is also thought to have been the bloodiest.

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Sati Chaura Ghat takes its name from the Hindu practice of Sati, in which the widow voluntarily or by force was burned along with her husband. Until the English banned this practice, the ghat would have been Sati ritually took place in Kanpur. During the Mutiny Sati Chaura Ghat became the place where many English women and children were killed or captured and later executed. William Simpson visited the ghat in 1859 where, as part of his royal commission he was aiming to capture aspects of Cawnpore in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny. My idea was to touch his practice and Indian history by following his pathway to that place, and so on the next day of my visit I searched for the ghat with my scroll. I found the ghat after several false starts. It sat two flights of stairs down to the water. A small red tin boat floated near the bank where I sat for some time. As I sketched, my sense of the place hovered between what I had read of the massacre, and the calm of the scene before my eyes. The river flowed slow, thick, and pale green, its far bank indiscernible through the haze.46 A woman came down the stairs and set herself up at the river’s edge where she proceeded to wash and ring out clothes before dipping herself. To one side a smaller set of stairs led to a tree, the roots of which were strewn with offerings; puja scarves, trinkets, and the little rainbow-garbed figures of gods and goddesses. Baboons with puce faces and similarly coloured bottoms scampered about. I watched them warily knowing them to be aggressive and prone to attack. My challenge in Kanpur in some ways reflected experiences of painting in Hunchy. I wanted to portray a sense of history, of what had been, and of what was now. I reflected on the place that had been Sati Chaura Ghat, then for a short time Massacre Ghat, and now a bit of both—Massacre Ghat without a memorial, and Sati Chaura Ghat, without the Sati ritual. Whatever version of history people seemed to be choosing to remember, it could not be a bloodied one. How else could they come down to the river’s edge and bathe peacefully, without belief in an older, more powerful story of renewal concerning this place and the river itself.

46

Ghat: the name Hindus give to a place by the river where people worship, bathe and wash.

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Sketching at Sati Chaura/Massacre Ghat. Still from field documentary

I made sketches of the ghat from several vantage points. It wasn’t often that I got out my watercolours but that day I laid down base washes of pale yellow and blue to help me record the ultra-diffused light and haze. I made notes in the scroll about the way that the haze altered and dimmed the colours of things. A palm that fascinated me with its root system formed of delicate tendrils found footing in my painting. Time passed and when it was late afternoon with the air getting cold I packed up, and rather hurriedly, to escape the curiosity of some fast-approaching baboons.

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Initial sketch of Sati Chaura/Massacre Ghat

Sketching at Sati Chaura/Massacre Ghat. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Sketching at Sati Chaura/Massacre Ghat available to authorised users. (Link)

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Under Modi Mill Flyover: An Opportunity to Re-appraise Practice

Under Modi Mill Flyover. Detail. Australind

By the time I arrived in Delhi my scroll was nearly full, and the India leg of my journey was almost over. I felt restless however after the long train journey and in the days remaining I followed an impulse to visit an industrial area called Okhla where is a huge traffic flyover known as Modi Mill Flyover. I had visited the flyover several years previously with a photographer who had been documenting the community living beneath it, and had not been able to forget the precarious state in which I had seen people existing. On this day when I arrived I found a different community of people living but there in similar circumstances. I introduced myself, and spent several hours with some of the women and their children sketching, filming, and making portraits.47 The ‘abject’ is a term is often used to describe physical and material circumstances in which suffering is going on. Whilst I did not see myself as deliberately in pursuit of abject subjects, the themes of non/belonging guiding me meant that I often found myself engaged with the stories of people, animals, and other life-forms whose circumstances might be described as abject, and of which the people living under Modi Mill Flyover were an example. 47 The Cruel Side of Delhi’s Beautification: Illegal Demolition in Baljeet Nagar, (New Delhi: Human Rights Law Network (HRLN), 2001), introduction.

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On the journey back to Gurgaon from the flyover I felt emotionally drained. I also felt a sense of emptiness, and dissatisfaction. This was strange to me as normally experiences of spending time with people, and especially ones that involved making drawings was something that I found exhilarating. I had observed the interest that my drawing held for the children at Modi Mill, the pleasure some had expressed in their being drawn, and had felt connection and empathy during these processes. But although these experiences had been part of what took place at Modi Mill flyover, as can be seen in the video, senses of doubt and ambivalence about my process as well as confusion accompanied me afterwards.

Sketching at Modi Mill Flyover. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Sketching at Modi Mill Flyover available to authorised users (Link). When I returned from Modi Mill, I found in Anindita’s home preparations for her upcoming wedding were in full swing. I took myself away from the hubbub and sat re-observing the film I had taken under the Flyover. I thought about the stark contrasts between this comfortable enclosed world and the grey, dusty and exposed spaces of the flyover. In the film I noted again the curiosity and interest expressed by the children about the process of being drawn. They and their mothers had given me the gift of their time, time which could not be returned. It occurred to me then that I had acted in an entitled and arrogant way, whereby I had come into their space, without taking time to properly introduce myself, or the purpose of my work. I had left in a likewise impromptu fashion, without regard for future interactions, or for what my spontaneous entry and exit might mean to the community. Though I had shown them the scroll, they did not really know where their images were going, or

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how these would be used. With these thoughts I felt remorse and also shame. What right had I to conduct myself in this way that evoked the superficiality of tourism? Urging artists to reconsider their practice in light of connective aesthetics, Susi Gablik asks them to make art “as if the world mattered”. In Baroda, such ideas had been as a wakeup call for me, altering how I thought about painting. I believed that I had taken these ideas on by reinventing my practice in what I felt were significant ways. But were things really different, or had those changes to my way of working been superficial? By following my impulse to visit Modi Mill, knowing full well that I was about to leave Delhi, I percieved in myself that hedonistic attitude attributable to Modernism as described by Gablik, an unwillingness to relinquish modernist ideas of anarchic individualism. I had to acknowledge that if I continued to work such ‘disenchanted’ ways, I would re-experience similar crises of meaning concerning the nature of my nomadic practice and what I was doing with painting.

Sarina

Sarina and her mother. Australind. Detail

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Stories converged in the Australind scroll during my last days in Delhi. One story had concerned my visit to Modi Mill, another concerned the events of Anindita’s wedding which I had offered to document on film and about which I intended to make a painting. In the midst of these a third story emerged in the form of the dramatic flight of Sarina, Anindita’s maid. In the time that I had been in Bengal, Bulbuli had married and been replaced by Sarina, a striking girl similar in age to Bulbuli, but in other ways very different. Sarina was not subservient, but did her cleaning with attitude. In her demeanour she seemed more to me like teenagers I had known in Australia. She wore jeans and t-shirts instead of shalwar kameez. When her employers were out, Sarina would turn up the volume on their huge flatscreen and dance with abandon to Bollywood films. It did not surprise me that she might wish to be something other than a maid, though I knew that it must surprise others that she dared to think she could. Then one day Sarina’s mother came to the door, hysterical. I watched as she fell on the floor at Anindita’s feet, touching her ankle, and imploring her help. Sarina had disappeared and her mother was terrified that she had been kidnapped. I took on the job of going through Sarina’s things in search of clues. Her few possessions were bundled in a kitchen cupboard and wrapped within them I found a man’s shirt and trousers, and a list of phone numbers. As the numbers were called and Sarina’s friends questioned, we learned that she had had a boyfriend, an older man who was married. It seemed that he had taken Sarina on a trip to Mumbhai, the film capital of India, in the state of Maharashtra. In the weeks between Sarina’s disappearance and reappearance in Mumbhai, no one knew if she were alive. During those days I made a portrait of her in the scroll from memory. I included an image of her mother—the supplicant, and an inventory of Sarina’s belongings. It felt strange to be engaged in making pictures at such a time, and yet doing so felt necessary somehow, as if the paintings held a prayer or invocation for her safe return.

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Self-portrayal

The orchid. Australind. Detail

I have spoken of self portrayal as a way of expressing my part in events during travel, but self-portraits also offered a means of expressing the ways in which I felt my identity shifting, opening to influence, and as something always in a state of becoming. Making autobiographical images I sought to express this through the use of morphed and hybrid forms. I often embellished these forms with animal characteristics such as horns, rabbit, deer, or elephant ears, paws, hooves, or fish tails. Drawing on the idea that some of the first symbolic forms created by humans were based on animals, working with animal forms and self-portraiture was for me about languaging the primal inner life. A portrait became an opportunity to question self in all kinds of ways, and that also reflected my absorption of language and encounters with local folklore.48 Traditionally in Persian and Mughal miniature painting, the life of ordinary people was not considered suitable subject material. Depicting the life of the court, artists portrayed women in stereotypical ways, or in ways that conformed to notions of beauty of the time. The artists themselves as ordinary mortals also were rarely depicted. For different reasons, in traditions of western travel painting of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, occidental artists tended to keep themselves out of the picture, complicit in extending omniscient views of the ‘exotic other’. 48

“Animal Geographies/Human Identities” 29, 31.

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Portraying myself engaged in ‘ordinary life’ was about distinguishing my contemporary practice from these conventions. Self portrayal was also about aligning myself with those who, over the course of time came to share the space of the scrolls.49 The singularity of people’s stories sang out to me as, pulled to the details, I looked deeper to find that what I had thought about women, men, animals, Australians, Pakistanis and Indians could not be generalised. At such points self-portraiture allowed me to depict the destabilisation of my own assumptions that, juxtaposed with stories of other people, represented my deeper dismantling of these. Sometimes fleeting glimpses of things such as a kitten curled into the niche of a wall, a flower growing gamely from a crack, or a discarded lolly wrapper spoke to me metaphorically. I connected with them, and in my paintings they doubled as a psychological form of self-dialogue. In India and later in Pakistan, encounters with mystical traditions of Baul and Sufism encouraged other kinds of self-questioning. In Bengal I often encountered Baul singers during train journeys, or crossing through bazaars, whose ideas were espoused within the Chitrakars’ philosophical framework of equality and brotherhood. But beyond this, the yearning that I sensed in the songs of devotees, wandering minstrels who have “only the wind as their home” touched a chord in me. It was a similar feeling to that I would have later on in Lahore, as I listened to qawwali, the devotional songs of the Sufi mystical tradition in which the singer repeatedly asks, “Who am I?”.50

References Baul, Parvathy. 2005. An introduction to the Baul Path: Song of the great soul. Kerala, South India: Ekatara Baul Sangeetha Kalari, Chittoore House, Mukkolakkal, Nedumangad, Thiruvananthapuram. Beja, M. 1971. Epiphany in the modern novel. University of Washington Press. Benjamin, Roger. 1997. Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee. Sydney: Art Gallery Auckland City and Art Gallery of New South Wales. Berger, John. 2001. John Berger: Selected essays. New York: Vintage Books. Berger, John. 2005. Berger on drawing. Aghabullogue, Co Cork, Ireland: Occasional Press. Berger, John. 2007. Hold everything dear: Dispatches on survival and resistance. New York: Pantheon Books. Byul Go, Eun. 2014. Seeds. Master of Fine Arts (thesis). Kent State University. Chaddock, Steve. 2010. Captain cook: The glass house mountains. In Earth, dreams, magic: A journey through the Blackall Range region, ed. Elaine Green and Michael Berry. Maleny: Hinterland Business Center.

49 Roger Benjamin, Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee (Sydney: Art Gallery Auckland City and Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997), 4, 8. 50 Parvathy Baul, An Introduction to the Baul Path: Song of the Great Soul (Kerala, South India: Ekatara Baul Sangeetha Kalari, Chittoore House, Mukkolakkal, Nedumangad, Thiruvananthapuram, 2005), 7, 8. Jeanne Openshaw, Seeking Bauls of Bengal (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31, 35.

References

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Gablik, Suzi. 1992. Connective aesthetics. Chicago Journals 6(2): 2–7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 3109088. Ghosal, Somnath. 2011. Pre-colonial and colonial forest culture in the presidency of Bengal. Human Geographies: Journal of Studies and Research in Human Geography 5 (1): 107–116. Gillie, Warren, and Cate Patterson. 2016. The first settlers of baroon pocket. Montville Historical Group: Montville History Group. Glaser, Daniel. 2005. Monkey do, monkey see. In Nova scienceNow, ed. Robert Krulwich. Hand, Beverly. 2010. Beverley’s story. In Earth, dreams, magic: A journey through the Blackall Range region ed. Elaine Green (ed.) and Michael Berry (ed. consultant). Maleny: Hinterland Business Center. Hossein Nasr, Seyyed. 1997. Islamic art and spirituality. Pakistan: Suhail Academy Lahore. Lejeune, Philippe. 2009. On diary. Honolulu, HI, USA: University of Hawaii Press. Lessing, Doris. 1981. Canopus in Argos; archives: The Sirian experiments; the report by Ambien II of the five. Great Britain: Jonathan Cape Ltd. Mahood, Kim. 2009. In the gap between two ways of seeing. Griffith Review Autumn 23. Mousumi. 2013. Interview with Mousumi. By Michal Glikson. Nasar, Hammad. 2010. The ‘Expanded Field’ of contemporary miniature. Nafas Art Magazine. http://u-in-u.com/nafas/articles/2010/contemporary-miniature/. Oberg, Kalervo. 1960. Cultural shock: Adjusting to new cultural environments (Reprint). Practical Anthropology 7: 177–182. Onus, Lin. 1990. Ground lice. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. Urban Dingo: The art and life of Lin Onus, 1948–1996: Craftsman House in association with the Queensland Art Gallery. Openshaw, Jeanne. 2004. Seeking bauls of Bengal. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Pile, Steve. 2005. Cities: Modernity, space and the phantasmagorias of city life. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd. Reynolds, Graham. 1971. A concise history of watercolours. London, Great Britain: Thames and Hudson. Stewart, Robyn. 2007. Creating new stories for praxis: Navigations, narrations, neonarratives. In Practice as research: Approaches to creative arts enquiry ed. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt. London: I.B. Tauris. Tagore, Rabindranath. 1958. On the edges of time ed. Viswa Bharati, 2nd ed. Kolkata: Kumkum Bhattacharya. Taylor, Jennifer. 2014. Portraits of country: A plein air painter in Arrernte country. Ph.D., Practice led research, Charles Darwin University. Thomas, Katie. 2013. J. & J. To Pay $2.2 Billion in Risperdal Settlement. The New York Times. Williams, Terry Tempest. 2008. Finding beauty in a broken world. Kirkus Media LLC.

Chapter 4

India, Pakistan and Australia: The Third Scroll: IndoPak

This chapter follows the development of paintings for the Australindopak Archive and the third and final scroll, Indopak. Significantly, social immersion redirects my inquiry away from the usual technical questions relating to painting towards others that ask about the social meaning of the practice. Painting during this leg of my journey takes on new meaning through my increased focus with one community and the stories that emerge through spending time with them. The meaning of the scroll also begins to shift as it becomes a way of logging insights into the life of this community that allow for activities of advocacy and agency. The scroll increasingly becomes an instrument that, like a photo album, I share with others, in the process also reminding myself of the events through which I, we, have come. The way I worked with film in India that had revealed itself as multi-purpose, in Pakistan contributes to my process in further significant ways. The films I make became important not only as research tools, but as records of relationships that I form with people, as well as of events that shape our lives. These films have the dual function of motivating continued development of paintings whilst also mirroring the progress and development of the scroll. The chapter begins with my arrival in Lahore where I set about creating the paper for the Indopak scroll. Discussions examine how I worked with the stories that emerged, and how the paintings that I made developed in response to encounters with people, animals and places in Lahore, the ‘city of a thousand years’, and further, to parts of regional Punjab and Pakhtunistan. After seven months I leave Pakistan for New Delhi to return to Australia and Hunchy in August 2014—but not before some unexpected events.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Glikson, Peripatetic Painting: Pathways in Social, Immersive, and Empathic Art Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4005-6_4

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Path from Kanpur to Delhi, Lahore, and Mardan

On December 16, 2014 I took a bus overland to the Atari-Wagah border. The ‘friendly’ bus as it was known in those days represented a diplomatic exercise between Indian and Pakistani governments. For two thousand rupees or about forty Australian dollars, passengers were ferried from the heart of Delhi to the Atari-Wagah border and inner Lahore. It was a journey of about eight hours during which for ‘security reasons’, the bus was escorted by police vehicles that blared their sirens continuously, and which had the disquieting effect of making this otherwise ordinary-looking bus highly conspicuous. On the journey to Lahore I considered the fact that my field period of twelve months was now more than half over. I brooded over my experience in Modi Mill, worrying about what this had revealed concerning deepening doubts about the meaning of my situational practice with painting.

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To Wagah-Atari border. Indopak. Detail

At the border the customs officer asked me to open the Australind scroll for inspection. I took delight in the way that the officer obligingly stamped the scroll where I pointed, at the end and in the logical place—unlike the placement of his stamp in my passport. I noted that the scroll was now full and that I would need to begin a new one. I had not anticipated filling an entire ten metre scroll in India, having planned to incorporate Indian and Pakistani journeys into one painting. Now it struck me that the Indo-Pakistan rift would be reflected symbolically through the division of scrolls. In Lahore I stayed in Gulberg, the suburb where I had first met my Pakhiwas friend Safia, with whom I hoped to reconnect. When I discovered Safia and her family camping near the place where I had first met them, and reassured by her welcome, I asked the landlord if I could lease a room for the following months. I hoped that being physically proximate to Safia and her family might allow me to better get to know them, their lifeworld, and their story. As a focus, I thought this might also provide means by which to help me shift and evolve the meaning of my practice that had been shaken by my experience at Modi Mill Flyover in India.

A New Scroll Before I could begin sketching I needed to find and prepare a new scroll. Paper for the first and second scrolls had come from a ream I had bought two years previously in Lahore. I remembered how that ream had been sawn up by hand like a wooden log, into six scrolls by my friend Imran, a sculptor, and teacher at a local university

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and found myself wondering if I had kept the remaining rolls with him. Upon calling Imran we discovered that a suitcase he had been patiently storing for me did indeed contain a roll of paper, the last of the original ream. We celebrated with his favourite dessert, an exotic New York baked cheesecake that cost more than my bus ticket from India. It was winter in Lahore and marbling the new scroll in the freezing conditions was a challenging process. My room had no heating and in the chilly air the oil paint remained thick and clotted. The markings produced during the marbling process came out monochromatic and volatile-looking. These contrasted greatly with the delicate patterns and olive and emerald tones of the Canberra and Australind scrolls, disrupting my vision for the three scrolls to have aesthetic unification. During power outages I contemplated the markings, trying to come to terms with them. I pondered Pakistan’s energy issues, attributable to its unregulated and chaotic system of distribution. My mind wandered to its troubled history, to the present unstable political climate, and back to the freezing, fog-veiled, high walled streets of the city. I looked at the stormy marbling which I still disliked but which now appeared metaphoric of the conditions and environs in which it had been made.

Example of marbling on the reverse side of the Indopak scroll

Babli of Main Market

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Babli of Main Market

Babli and I in Main Market. IndoPak. Detail

Main Market is the main bazaar and transport hub in Gulberg. I got to know the market quite well, mapping parts of it in my scroll. I walked there most every day, an informal oscillatory ritual that invariably involved stopping with Safia and her family along the way. The central area of Main Market was always congested but there was one teashop with a curtained area at the back which became my haunt, a handy place in which to take a break, meet a friend, make a phone call, sketch in the scroll, and wait for minibuses or local buses to other parts of the city. In Main Market I often encountered Babli, a colourful personality, gregarious and charming, and always dressed in bright colours with dramatic makeup. Babli would spot me and call out, and arm in arm we would stroll and take a round of the market. Babli attracted a good deal of attention which had the effect of making me shy to ask her to sit for a portrait, which might well draw a crowd. There came a day in Main Market however when I encountered Babli wearing a freshly stitched shalwar kameez with particularly dramatic makeup to match, an outfit in which she seemed to take great pride, and I couldn’t resist asking her to sit for a sketch.

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With Babli in Main Market. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary With Babli in Main Market available to authorised users. (Link) Sitting on the sidewalk with Babli drew the attention of the chowkidars, the security guards, fronting the fancy Main Market shops, as I had feared. I had some difficulty acheiving permission from them to conduct our portraiture activity there, and thought we would have to find another place. Fortunately a kind passer-by took pity on my attempts to communicate what I was doing, and was able to appease the guards, gaining us some time. Babli seemed to enjoy the process and gave her approval of the resulting drawing. I took the opportunity to ask her some questions about herself. I learned that Babli lived quite far from Main Market with her brother, father, and mother. She came most days to sell haberdashery or teatowels, income which she supplemented by working as a make-up artist for weddings. In Pakistan bridal makeup is traditionally striking and theatrical and for Babli, a skill in which she was adept and in which she took pride. It was then that I understood that her dramatically made up face was not only about adornment, but an important form of promotion for her business.

Understanding Through Drawing

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Understanding Through Drawing

Hanging out with Safia. Indopak. Detail

Safia’s jhumpiri sits lightly on the earth, frail, ephemeral and in sharp contrast with its surroundings of walls behind which squat huge concrete houses. To Safia and her family these houses might as well be on other planets for their inner worlds are as inaccessible and as far away. I visited Safia and her family often during the seven months that I was in Pakistan and thus I came to paint about many aspects and events of their life in that time. The stories I made about this family weave through the scroll, appearing at random. Early paintings were about time spent with Safia, such as when we would hang out in the field behind her tent, as can be seen in the painting above.

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Sketching with Safia. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Sketching with Safia available to authorised users. (Link) I became increasingly interested in the way Safia’s family survived, especially the way they recycled and repurposed found material. I became fascinated by the design of their tent, which in Punjabi and Urdu is called a jhuggi, or jhumpiri. The more I looked at the jhumpiri, the more I appreciated the invention and ingenuity that had gone into its construction. Over time I learnt that it was was a logical and evolving structure, one that was constantly being adapted and added to so as to accommodate extra people, purposes, and needs, including shifts in location, season, and climate. My way of trying to understand the jhumpiri was to spend time sitting inside and outside, making the kind of drawings that John Berger describes as arriving out of a series of confirmations and denials which “bring you closer to the object until finally you are as it were, inside it”.1 I found the internal architecture of the jhumpiri exceptionally challenging to draw. Sometimes there was regularity in the way posts of bamboo had been tied to form a large informal frame, and the way that more bamboo had been bent to create curved roof supports and beams. However the measurements varied and no part of the structure was predictable. This was not a construct that one could look at a few times and represent through assumptions of correlations or symmetries. The jhumpiri was logical as a design because it functioned and suited the needs of its occupants 1

John Berger, Berger on Drawing (Aghabullogue, Co Cork, Ireland: Occasional Press (www.occ asionalpress.net), September 2005).

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perfectly. Yet no matter how much time I spent inside, I struggled to convey its asymetric, fey geometry, and anarchic qualities and my drawings of it felt more like personal interpretations rather than accurate or objective representations.

Safia’s jhumpiri. IndoPak. Detail

The structure of the jhumpiri revealed itself as a mosaic of the found and the recycled. Each strut and pole was bound to others with strips of twisted fabric, string or old rope. The canopy was an expanse of patchwork composed of cloth from sheets, plastic sacking, tough old clothes. I found the variegation of textures and colours of the jhumpiri beautiful, practical, and expressive. In time I was to encounter many jhumpiris through my interactions with Safia and her community and thus came to appreciate the range of inventiveness that went into the making of each jhumpiri. I was fascinated by the way each jhumpiri evoked its own ideas of temporality. There was singularity and distinctiveness in the construction of a tent but also repetition and patterning in way that materials would make re-appearances, and in the methods of their unification. Safia’s jhumpiri evoked ideas of time such as the time it had taken to find and collect its materials, and to decide how these should be integrated, as well as the time-rich processes of hand stitching the whole together. Handtitches large and small ran saliently through its structure, binding and reinforcing canopy, walls, and internal areas, affirming culture, and also the will to survive. I wondered at the jhumpiris not only as ingenious living spaces but as structures that gave the feeling of having been located and then held together by sheer acts of will.2

2

Tara Tidwell, “Uru Life More Than a Tourist Attraction,” Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, no. September (2001). Ideas of stitching and/or weaving found/available materials to make living spaces reflects thinking about traditionally nomadic peoples other than the Pakhiwas of Pakistan, such as the Uru people of Bolivia and Southern Peru who notably have woven ‘islands’ using grasses on the waters of Lake Titikaka.

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Inside Safia’s jhumpiri my eyes strained in the dim light to understand all that was going on with its internal structure. A collection of old handbags hung out of reach of small children revealed themselves to be designated medicine cabinets. An old yellow duppatta tied hammock-style stored clean pots and dishes. Sacks and bags hung from the rafters contained and kept dry spices, rice, flour, dal. Small clay pots containing oil hung from beams to be lit at night for light, or to keep away insects. In one corner sat a large tin trunk called a peti. Every family had this kind of trunk in which were kept more valuable possessions. Over the peti were piled the brilliant rallies, the quilts that Safia had made each summer for the past years. The floor was covered with found carpet. The fireplace formed of three broken bricks contained pieces of broken crates set in readiness for cooking the next meal. There was an orange cooler for water, and a space for tethering the family’s two goats. I looked down at the comfortable seat I sat on and recognised it as the wide old-style seat of a bicycle.

Drawing on the road. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Drawing on the road available to authorised users. (Link)

The Baba of the Graveyard

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The Baba of the Graveyard

With the Baba of the graveyard. Indopak. Detail

One day a friend called and asked if I would like to accompany him to Lahore’s largest graveyard where he wanted to interview a baba, a mystic who lived there. The baba dwelt in a tent made of long panels of luxury fabric, and it was an altogether different affair to Safia’s jhuggi. The tent was set up within the graveyard and adjacent to the shrine of the saint. The baba sat, naked to the waist, the rest of him wrapped in a grey blanket, tending a sacred fire that I was told was never allowed to go fully out. In a small cauldron he stirred a special, extra sweet, creamy brew of chai. This he poured into cups for the stream of visitors who came for council, blessings, and to offer prayers to their loved ones buried close by. I sketched the baba as he sat with his hookah, listening to a man who seemed in low spirits. The air inside the tent was thick with pungent smoke. The fabric of its walls was hung with objects; talismans, photographs of old gurus, bundles of herbs, a shawl, a scarf. Sacred stones lay next to cups, pots, plastic bags of tea and spices, a bag full of milk, tin spoons, a strainer. It was winter but inside the tent it might have been summer for the soporific warmth. Having finished my sketch and a third cup of chai I tipped over and fell asleep. When I woke it was as if from a dream for the tent was empty and cold and the fire just an ember, the baba and my friend having gone for the interview and filming amongst the graves.

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The Ralli Motif The next day I came to Safia’s jhumpiri to find one of the twins, five year old Abbas down with a fever. I held his little hand as he lay huddled under one of Safia’s quilts. I sketched his form. That evening, developing the sketch into a painting, I wondered if Abbas’ fever had subsided. I thought of the baba of the graveyard and of his reputation as a healer, and added his figure to the sketch in a way that made him appear to be holding Abbas in the quilt on his lap. If sometimes happened that a painting became a way for me to express personal hopes, wishes, and desires in response to encounters with others. If I met or saw someone in need or in pain for example, a painting offered an outlet of expression that felt like supplication or prayer as with my painting of Abbas and the Baba.

Abbas under the quilt. IndoPak. Detail

In my paintings about Safia and her family, the tessellated motifs of her quilts came to feature often. It happened that as I travelled and walked in localities I often found motifs, symbols, or patterns in street signage or other visual culture offering me language with which to refer to things I portrayed in my paintings. Some motifs such as the rarrk design had come through encounters with cultural items on display. With Safia’s family I discovered what it was like to connect firsthand with a cultural

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motif of significance and complexity in the form of the ralli and its tessellated patterns that encapsulates the life and history of Safia’s community. Safia and her family were gleaners. They collected things that had been thrown away for their own use and to sell as recyclables. Their cultural heritage included the ralli, or quilt which significantly was created through patchwork using gleaned and discarded cloth. To make her quilts Safia gleaned her fabric from old sheets and clothes. As she told me, sometimes it took her many months to collect enough pieces of the right kind of cloth to create a quilt. My understanding of Safia’s quilts developed over time and through witnessing their role in the family’s life. In winter family members would keep warm beneath them. With their bold tessellated patterns, the quilts were colourful beacons in the grey urban wasteland. They often took centre-stage in the drama of the family’s struggles against the city authorities, which exploited their attachment to their quilts by confiscating them, demanding fines for their return. When spring came I watched Safia begin stitching a new quilt, cutting triangles for her pattern from recycled fabrics. As she explained, the quilts were heirlooms, passing from mother to daughter along with the skills of making. I marvelled at her complex designs created without template or reference. She said the tiling on suburban houses inspired her and I wondered if these designs expressed her longing for a house of her own. I asked if she ever sold her quilts and learned that Pakistanis rarely buy them because they bear the stigma associated with jhumpiri-wallahs. Patricia Ormsby Stoddard has researched the ‘ralli’ or ‘julli’ as it is also known in context of Punjab’s quilt culture. Hearing the family use these words for their quilts I wondered if this pointed to history which the family themselves could not explain. Ormsby suggests that the quilt signifies the ancient semi-nomadic culture of its makers, which challenges perceptions that families such as Safia’s are recent encroachers on the city of Lahore. Although pursuing these questions was beyond the scope of my project, witnessing the living relationship of a quilt-maker and her family to their quilts grounded my understanding of these objects that embody a personal history and a larger history of textile creation.3 The tessellated patterns of the quilts suggested a cultural voice, a language intrinsically related to belonging. Similar to my process with the Yirrkala rarrk motif, I took tessellation into my vocabulary and brought it across into paintings not directly related to stories about Safia’s family. For example, I worked tessellation into a painting I made about a coat that had been designed to transform into a shelter by American designer Veronika Scott for people in her city of Detroit.4 Applying the ralli patterns I sought to connect the idea of the coat-shelter and its intended recipients to the plight of the quilt-makers of Lahore.

3

Patricia Ormsby-Stoddard, “Fabric of Belonging: Exotic Quilts from Pakistan and India Exhibition, June 27-November 29,” Collection of Patricia Ormsby-Stoddard, http://moa.byu.edu/fabricof-belonging/, accessed 5/02/2016. 4 Bonnie Alter, “Winter Coat Turns into a Sleeping Bag for the Homeless,” Treehugger.com, http:// www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/empowerment-plan-sleeping-bags.html.

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Safia makes a ralli. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Safia makes a ralli, available to authorised users. (Link)

Agency, Painting, and Film I used film a great deal whilst working with Safia and her family and found its purposes and functions were always evolving. I was using ethnographic modes of filming and the approach of the ‘unprivileged camera’, a style where the filmmaker takes up normal and available positions. I compiled an extensive film diary which I would look over in my own time, and when possible with a translator. The diaries became a means of chronicling the day to day life of the family and activities that were ongoing, such as Safia making her quilts. Film was also a way of recording special occasions such as when Safia bought a sewing machine, or when she and Amanat took me to the outskirts of Lahore to look at a plot they wished to buy. I used the diaries to create field documentaries about the family, as well as for my own reobservation of days and events.5 Taking film inadvertently provided a means of recording incidents of injustice to which I was a witness, such as one day when I arrived at the jhumpiri to find the entrance obstructed by a mountain of bricks which the family had been ordered to stack and ‘mind’ by the plots’ security guard. I had been sitting inside the jhumpiri absorbed in sketching when I became aware that a truck had pulled up and was tipping a load of bricks at the entrance. As bricks 5

David MacDougall, “Unprivileged Camera Style,” RAIN 50, no. 50 (1982): 259.

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began spilling into the jhumpiri, Safia appeared and began to carry and stack them behind the tent. I filmed her and her children as they did this laborious work for a time, after which I began helping. As we stacked the bricks I tried to ask Safia why this was happening. She told me that the guard would often make arrangements to store loads of bricks in the field in return for bribes. Whenever bricks arrived Safia, Amanat, their children and and any other visiting members of their community had to carry them into the plot and stack them, as she said “for safekeeping”. Today even though she was weak with fever, Safia said that if she didn’t stack the bricks then the guard would threaten to have the family evicted from the plot. It was a form of labour extortion as the family already paid thousands of rupees each month to the plot guard. However as squatters, they had no recourse to help. In fact, as I saw, anyone potentially could come and extort from them by evoking threats of eviction. I used the film to construct a painting to record this incident that had highlighted the family’s vulnerability by showing me how favours could be extracted from them.

The Bricks. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary The Bricks available to authorised users. (Link)

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The bricks. Indopak. Detail

Events such as the dumping of the bricks show how over time I found myself in a position similar to that of Panamanian-American artist and ethnographer Arturo Lindsay who, during his artist residency in Portobello, began wondering whether his responsibilities should include assisting his host community with attaining selfdetermination. About his dilemma Lindsay said, “I only know that I could not just observe without becoming involved.” In response to things I was witnessing with Safia and her family I realised that like Lindsay, I wanted to do what I could on the family’s behalf.6 Safia’s family belonged to a people known as Pakhiwas who are descended from semi nomadic tribes of Punjab and the neighbouring province of Sindh. These tribes traditionally practiced a variety of professions including different forms of theatre and performance such as puppetry, but also animal herding, for which oscillating within particular regions was integral to their way of life and culture. When the Partition of India took place which saw the creation of Pakistan, this caused major internal displacement of Hindu and Muslim populations, with the consequent arrival in Pakistan of diaspora communities, known as mohajirs. These events brought 6

Ibid., 157, 58.

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changes to the division of land, resulting over time in the enclosure of large areas for development, and consequently tremendous pressure on resources. In cities such as Lahore and particularly Karachi which had been a fishing village, the dramatic and unplanned for increases in population brought chaos. As spaces these metropolises have become increasingly able to be regulated only by explicit forces of power. Tribal communities such the Pakhiwas were sidelined and became marginalised through lack of a united voice which meant that they gained no rights in terms of being able to access, own, or traverse land. Today the Pakhiwas remain unacknowledged and unaccounted for in Pakistan’s Constitution though their numbers are significant, and their presence in the region has been confirmed as enduring, perhaps even as long as the Pathans of Khyber Pashtunistan.7 Although Islam denounces divisions of caste, caste divisions in Pakistani society exist and are pervasive. The situation of the Pakhiwas is complex however they could be said to constitute a caste who, alongside other subcastes occupy the lowest positions. Members of their communities find it almost impossible with rare exceptions, to access education and without this are permitted to conduct only certain kinds of activities. These are predominantly concerned with rubbish and recycling and through this work but also for other reasons, Pakhiswas communities are stigmatised. In a society where the cost of accommodation is very high, beyond what many can afford, competition for land and housing is fierce. The Pakhiwas occupy whatever space in the city they can find, and this, combined with the particular aesthetic of their makeshift dwellings means that in general those who live proximate to Pakhiwas communities see them as undesirable neighbours. Though Pakhiwas lack the power to actually occupy land, they are commonly referred to as ‘encroachers’. Though it is true that on occasions Pakhiwas families have managed to purchase plots of land, these I was told, were used more for emergency camping and storage of possessions. Their cultural inclination is to move about for various purposes including that of visiting relatives, conducting ceremonies and rituals, and the work of collecting and selling recyclables. Many Pakhiwas also supplement their incomes where they can with jobs such as cleaners, sweepers, which was the case with Safia’s husband Amanat, as well as begging which requires movement and mobility.

7

Waqas H. Butt, “Beyond the Abject: Caste and the Organisation of Work in Pakistan’s Waste Economy,” International Labour and Working-Class History No. 95, no. Spring (2019). 26. 28.

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The plot of dreams. Detail. Indopak

Filming, drawing, spending time with Safia and her family, and above all listening, even with my limited Urdu, had taught me something of their hopes and aspirations. One of these involved purchasing a plot in outer Lahore where members of their community had settled. Safia showed me the contract and I saw that without literacy or legal advice the details of their agreement were hazy. I asked for a copy and had it checked by a friend with experience in real estate. As he explained to the family, their contract was fundamentally flawed through lack of a plot number. To clarify this, we travelled to the realtor to discuss the contract, stopping on the way to see the plot. I sat sketching the area that Safia and Amanat had hoped to buy. The plot was a bare patch of dry brown earth about the size of a large car around which camped other families in jhuggis, on similarly bare plots. There were few walls or fences, though some plots had been demarcated by stones. We had come via a dirt road riddled with potholes but otherwise I could see no infrastructure, no well or pipes for water or gas, and no electricity poles. At the realtor’s office, the agent had finally admitted that the land had not been legally subdivided, posing a risk for the buyer. The contract had revealed other implications through ‘flexible’ payments that enabled deposits on plots with minuscule savings, but which gave the seller the right to alter the amount of repayment. Although it was not within my capacity to advise the family, advocacy entered my practice as I sought to use my connections in Lahore to assist them with their decision about buying the land. Agency as a process began when I observed the children making drawings on the road. Wanting to encourage them but concerned for their safety, I brought paper and crayons to encourage them to draw off the road. Then I located a playgroup and with Safia and Amanat’s permission Omair and I took the children regularly. The parents were enthusiastic about this idea saying that this would contribute to their larger aim of schooling the children.

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There were challenges as the playgroup catered for Urdu and English speakers while the children spoke Punjabi. This was the children’s first experience of being welcomed into an upper class house and they were shy. Attending, they relied on the support of intermediaries such as Omair and myself, and would not approach the facility alone.

Children painting a scroll in the jhumpiri. Still from field documentary, 2014

Abbas at the playgroup. Field film 2014

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I found myself trying to convey the complexity of what advocacy was revealing to me about the family’s life in my paintings. Though my actions were small, they contributed in important ways to the story emerging in the scroll by depicting what I had witnessed of Safia and Amanats’ search for stability through attempts to acquire land and education for their children. Such findings helped me to make paintings that contradicted societal perceptions of the family as ‘lifestyle gypsies’. Thus the paintings that I made with them took unexpected directions as acts of witnessing, advocacy, and agency became not only my way of contributing, but also furnished material that gave their unfolding story complexity and dimension.

“He Acts Like He Owns the Street”: Multi-coloured Realities At Safia’s jhumpiri I watched the children playing in an abandoned bathtub. They screamed with joy, seemingly oblivious to their grey and abject surroundings. Nearby hung the family’s visually magnetic quilts, boldly announcing to the world, “Here we are!” Another time as Safia described how the authorities were again harassing them to move, we caught sight of her youngest child Abbas, skipping down the road stark naked, twirling a balloon in his fingers. “Look at my son”, said Safia. “He acts like he owns the street.” Spending time with Safia and her family allowed me to see their life as complex and multi-coloured. Filming and painting, I came to better appreciate how appropriate painting was for conveying this complexity through being a multi-layered language that speaks to emotions. Far from wanting to romanticise their life, this was about painting to reflect the multiplicity that I sensed, rather than the “actuality” that I saw. With Safia and her family I experienced a turning point in my practice as her world became one to which I kept returning. Although I was having other encounters within Lahore and beyond the city that also yielded stories for the third scroll Indopak, Safia’s world felt like the one around which I oscillated during my time in Pakistan, and was why the story of her and her family appears as a key thread weaving throughout. When I left Pakistan I continued searching for ways in which I could advocate for Safia and her family. An opportunity emerged through my PhD exhibition through organising the raffle of a quilt she had made, which I had brought back with me. This activity raised awareness as well as an amount equalling six months of Amanat’s salary which I wired to Omair’s mother, who delivered it as rupees. Other opportunities to assist came through exhibitions of video works I had created using footage filmed with the family. I may have left Pakistan, but Safia and her world had not left me with the result that advocacy became an ongoing and unfolding activity. In 2019 Omair and I travelled back to Pakistan where we made a small but significant contribution to the family through the purchase of a plot of land. I hoped that this might increase their security and raise their chances for a better life. The hardships of squatting had taken their toll on Safia over the years and I worried for her health. The irony of settling her family whose cultural inheritance was grounded in the nomadic was there, but the fact was that for Pakhiwas people issues of marginalisation and

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exploitation were not improving. Gifting the plot was about acknowledging this, and also the significant contribution that the family had made to my own work. In sharing their lives they had indelibly altered mine in refocusing, enriching, and reshaping how I thought about and used painting. With the resources I had, small acts such as the purchase of the tiny plot on the very outskirts of Lahore were all that could be achieved until larger issues of equality and human rights for the Pakhiwas community were addressed but as Safia said to me, “It is enough”.

Pelican Story

Pelican story. Detail. Indopak

My landlord Yazdani employed a man called William whose job it was to run errands all over Lahore, and he knew the city well. One day he told Omair and I of a hakim or quacksalver he knew in Old Lahore who boasted of once owning an Australian Pelican. Curious, I asked William if he would take us to the hakim. We found Mr. Manzoor sitting on a blanket selling brightly coloured pills for all kinds of ailments. He told us that he had indeed once owned a pelican which he had bought in Karachi’s infamous wet markets, a source point for illegal and exotic animals. He had owned it for a while before selling it for twenty thousand rupees, the equivalent of about two hundred and fifty Australian dollars. I asked him where he thought the pelican might be now and he said he did not know. Pelicans are social birds, full of

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life and personality and I found myself wondering how this one had got to Pakistan, and how it had survived the state of being alone and perhaps confined to a small cage. Near the portrait I made of Mr. Manzoor I painted two pelicans. Later I realised I had represented one of the birds flying backward in the direction of Hunchy at the beginning of the scroll, homing back down the paper towards Australia as it were. As a decision which I did not recall making intentionally, this showed me that a part of myself was actively engaged in re/imagining the destinies of subjects with which I connected—even ones I had never actually met. It also showed me that within the scroll I was often doing more than the work of chronicling by projecting wishes, hopes and desires about the fate of others as well as of my own.

In Jilani Park

Running in Jilani Park. Indopak. Detail

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In Lahore I went daily to a place known as Jilani Park. I would leave at dawn to get to there via a public minibus. The drivers of these buses had adopted a way of driving that involved speeding up frantically at every opportunity and coasting their vehicle in gearless mode, taking corners on two wheels. This made for terrifying experiences and I often pleaded with them to slow down even offering drivers bribes to slow down, but they refused, insisting that this strategy saved fuel. I needed to access the park on a regular basis because I found the green of its interior respite from the endless noise, concrete, and pollution of the city. Jilani park was where the British had had their polo grounds and it still held stables of horses. Along the periphery of the park wound a clay track fringed with many very old, huge, and beautiful trees. In the early morning to see the horses moving through the mist and smell their sweet earthy scent was like a balm. As a female foreigner jogging I attracted attention. Sometimes people peered into my face questioningly, saying “Chinese?”. Sometimes I received enthusiastic and encouraging comments such as “Shabash!” (Wonderful). Or “Very Good!”, or “Bismillah!” (Let it begin, with the name of God). An old man who often sat at one corner of the park would clap his hands with glee whenever I came past, and once came tottering forward to fill my hands with candies. I found this gesture sweet as to bring tears to my eyes. But sometimes harsh laughter came from people as I passed and pierced my mood. Sometimes also I would be spotted by youths who, haning over the fence, would pass comments so vulgar as to make me lose my temper and and scream back insults. Then there were the stalkers—men intent on engaging with me and who would follow on my heels, sometimes round and round the park, until sick with fear and anger I would spin on them and confront them with my fists, and my less-than-convincing threats of police action. The park contained features intended to be cheerful or aesthetically pleasing but which I did not understand. I found such things as the rubbish bins shaped like elephants with gaping mouths disturbing, and the many tortured looking sculptures of people and animals confusing rather than appealing. These together with the critcs and the stalkers sometimes made me feel as if I was beset by ‘Jalani djinns’, which I sought to negotiate through representation in my scroll.

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My Landlord Yazdani

Yazdani. Indopak. Detail

My landlord Yazdani came into the scroll because of the colourful stories he told me concerning his ancestry, and because I found his place fascinating. Yazdani would seat himself in an armchair wearing his preferred outfit of striped pyjamas, dressing gown, Mickey Mouse slippers, and topi—the folded felt cap favoured by men of Punjab. Over cups of chai served by the faithful William, he would reveal the history of his tribe. Yazdani’s tribe I learned were originally nomads who traded across Central Asia. My jaw dropped slightly at the relaxed way in which Yazdani described their first profession as slave traders, which they conducted profitably for many years. When their pir or holy man had a dream in which he was told to forbid them this ignominious business, the tribe listened and in place of slaves took up trading horses. From horses they moved to carpets, then spices, precious woods, and perfumes, and finally into realm of gold, gems, and precious artifacts. By the time Yazdani’s people arrived in Pakistan six or seven hundred years later they were extremely wealthy, enough to become zamindars or landowners. In the course of shifting from a life of moving to one more settled, Yazdani’s people became collectors. Yazdani was a confirmed hoarder, his compound a sprawling pirate’s cave and museum of treasures. The floor of the yard was piled with beautiful, rare, antique blue and turquoise tiles lifted from Sufi shrines of the Sindh deserts. Sections of ancient buildings replete with exquisitely carved wooden facades, hauled all the way from Chitral and Swat, sat stacked against the walls. Huge pieces of heirloom furniture brought from villages of the provinces stood waiting to be dipped,

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stripped, and tipped into varnish, before being sold and shipped to cafes, restaurants, and villas all over the world. Yazdani boasted of his clientele and projects that had seen any number of cafés and villas in Europe refurbished or renovated with Swati and Chitrali architectural ornaments. In the compound I wandered the aisles of building fragments, pondering their carvings. I sketched ornate doors, a carved wedding chest, and also a heavily embroidered Chitrali dress. I marvelled at their craftsmanship, wondering all the while what it was that their previous owners were using to fill the yawning gaps created in their homes and material culture. Yazdani had added to his already large house many extensions and annexes. Most held renters but a series of downstairs rooms contained his pride and joy, a private museum. In the museum cultural artefacts, relics, and bric-a-brac had been arranged and curated, but the way of a vegetable market, everything bang up against and in some cases piled on top of each other. In the manner of a candid camera talk show host, Yazdani would appear unannounced at my door accompanied by guests, asking to be shown the scrolls. Though sometimes I resented the intrusion, I would roll out Australind, taking the opportunity to share and shock people with stories of India. Sometimes the guests asked questions but usually they sank into the cushions to listen compliantly, or perhaps for the simple pleasure of being told a tale by a stranger.

Puppi

Puppi. Indopak. Detail

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In the bazaar near Yazdani’s compound I had noticed a puppy, about six weeks old. She was suffering badly from a skin disease and people shooed her from every corner. She was very frail and I began returning to check on her, keeping my distance for fear of catching the disease. One day I filmed, another day I sketched her. I noted that she had a mother who looked fairly healthy, but that the disease was overcoming the puppy such that she was becoming nothing but skin and bone. I felt to help her, yet I worried about catching the disease, and about the criticism this might bring from local people. In Pakistan dogs are commonly thought of as impure, and to handle street dogs is considered haraam (forbidden). Living on my own, without many contacts and with limited language skills, I hesitated to invite judgement from the people in this bazaar where I bought my food and other essentials. I worried too about what my landlord would say if I brought the puppy to my place, and so I wavered, doing nothing for a while but observing. Daily I crossed the bazaar and noted the pup’s condition deteriorating. She would totter across the road, too weak now to dodge traffic and I feared she would be run over. I thought about the sketches I had made of her that I had begun to build into paintings. I began to wonder what these pictures would mean if one day I walked past and found her dead. Questions of ethics in my practice arose often in the field because of the unknowns concerning what kinds of subjects might present. Prior to commencing my travel I had been required to apply for ethical permission to research with people, but not with animals, regarding the ethics of advocacy and agency. Those half-completed sketches made me realise that if the puppy died then so would the meaning in my practice. The next day I walked to the bazaar carrying a clean, old towel, found the puppy lying in the dust scratching herself raw and scooped her up. As I walked towards the line of rickshaws I glanced behind to see everybody in the bazaar watching. A rickshaw driver who had been looking on also, saw the puppy and smiled. We set off for the student-run veterinary clinic at Lahore university where I had been told treatment was compassionate, and reasonably priced. As we bumped along I worried for the puppy who lay limply in my lap. She was in so much pain she was crying. I had never seen a dog so tangibly distressed and loathed myself for having hesitated so long with coming to her aid. Coming from Australia with its regulations concerning the kinds of animals permitted as pets, at the clinic my eyes were opened to another world. In Pakistan there seemed to be few rules about what animals could be kept as besides dogs and cats in every shape and size, there were many exotic animals looking uncomfortably far from their habitat. I saw two small rainforest monkeys, a chimpanzee, and an orangutang who clutched a teddy in a state of weak anxiety. There were people holding cages containing rare birds including birds of paradise, rainbow coloured parrots, a macaw, a toucan, and to the side a woman stood with her arms full of peacock.

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I sat in the queue opposite a young man whose small dog stood on her hind legs resting her face his hands and the picture they made found me wishing for my scroll. There were long-eared goats, a Shetland pony, a donkey, a mule, and a flock of bluish mountain sheep who, with their shepherd, looked as if they had walked straight off the Hindu Kush. A sports car with black windows slewed up, skidded, and dropped off a harassed looking man with his arms full of lion cub. There was a hush as everyone looked up, and the sheep baaed nervously. The puppy was given an injection and a bottle of yellow shampoo but I found neither worked. She had been diagnosed with advanced scabies and after some thought I decided to take her to a homeopathic clinic which, I had been told, welcomed animals. The homeopathy worked for the pup who within ten days was better as to be almost unrecognisable, and for myself as by then I too had the scabies. The name ‘Puppi’ had stuck but as this means ‘kiss’ in Punjabi, people giggled when they heard me calling her. Whilst caring for the puppy, a photographer friend came to visit. I had shared with her my dilemma and sense of shame about hesitating to help the puppy. In response she told me the story of the photojournalist Kevin Carter. While on assignment in Sudan in 1993, Carter had photographed a child who was starving, in the act of trying to drag herself to a United Nations food station. In the background of the photograph he took and later had published could be seen a vulture watching, waiting for her to die. The photograph subsequently generated questions about the role of agency in art practice when it was learned that Carter had not assisted the child, whose fate remained unknown. Carter was a seasoned journalist who had received accolades for his work but it is thought that this episode contributed to his loss of belief in his work and to depression to which he eventually submitted by taking his life. Carter’s story stimulated further questions for me about compassion, action, and the meaning of professionalism. As researcher Elan Abrell points out, experiences of grief in the field reveal the impossibility of true professional detachment. “As researchers we are already entangled with the beings we study and—at least sometimes- intervening when we can to stop or minimise death and suffering can also be a mode of observation, providing new and otherwise inaccessible insights and understandings.”8 Debates about whether humans should or should not become involved in the lives of animals with whom they interact in the name of research suggest that the ‘old school’ ideas received by scientists and anthropologists in the last century continues to overpower empathic or compassionate impulses. Memories of the dilemmas I had had about rescuing the puppy resurfaced when I saw the documentary My Octopus Teacher which delves into the relationship that developed between a researcher and an octopus over the course of a year.9 Watching the film, there seemed little question about the ways in which their connection represented a bond, expanding both 8

Abrell, Elan. “The Mongoose Trap: Grief, Intervention, and the Impossibility of Professional Detachment.” Chap. 4 In Vulnerable Witness: The Politics of Grief in the Field, edited by Kathryn Gillespie and Patricia J. Lopez, 68–77: University of California Press, 2019. 77. 9 Pippa Erlich and James Reed, “My Octopus Teacher,” (South Africa: Netflix, 2020).

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beings in remarkable ways. And yet there came a point during which the octopus was in a life-threatening situation in which the documentarist in his capacity could have assisted. That he did not, despite his evident distress and concern, suggested conflict between an innate, primal, and human desire to assist, and conditioning stemming from institutional attitudes regarding researchers “interfering” with the object of study. What is it about the act of offering assistance to another being that engenders fear or ambivalence? Is it just about ‘observational integrity’, or is it that in doing so, a bond may be forged, and with this a possibility for further relationship? When I consider the bonds that generated between myself and those who cared for me during periods of illness in my fieldwork, I can see the power of such events, which do not end as it were but continue to affect, inform, and connect. Continuing to make work with and about non-human beings, my sense is that as with human relationships, tests of commitment regarding interspecies relationships are inevitable. Attitudes within anthropology are changing radically to accommodate emerging ideas and philosophies about interspecies relationships and the possibilities forthwith. For both scientists and artists such tests offer important opportunities for relating more fully with species other than our own, but especially in the face of systemic notions of the detached observer, and modes of thinking that seek to justify our alienation from and exploitation of life on this earth.

Puppi Before and After. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Puppi Before and After available to authorised users. (Link) After several weeks of caring for the puppy, fellow renters complained to my landlord and I had to find her an alternate home. I asked Safia and her family if

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they might take the puppy till she was fully grown, with registration and money for feeding her. They agreed and in her time with them Puppi became fat and boisterous. Throughout Safia was my ally, knowing how I had bonded with the dog, and she tried hard to keep her with them, but some months later Puppi ran away. Safia told me she saw her with another white dog and so I hoped that the puppy lived on and was happy. Years later I still think of Puppi and wonder where she is. Each subsequent visit to Pakistan I have found myself looking round corners in hope of seeing her white face with its black patch. I wonder if this is a legacy of the bond forged between rescuer and rescued. Or was it also that with Puppi I had an opportunity to recover something of the humanity that I almost lost in the process of trying to hold that of an institutionalised approach to research.

Remembering Puppi. Indopak. Detail

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The Listening Space: Rafhan’s Story

Rafhan. Indopak. Detail

I was giving a workshop in situational drawing at the National College of Arts when I met Rafhan, a Masters student from Baluchistan who was studying painting. I was standing beside him looking at his work when he quietly began explaining to me that it was about personal experiences of persecution and oppression.10 I showed him the allegory of the Kashmiri Kowboy in the Australind scroll and told him of my interest in struggles to do with belonging. When I asked if he might be interested to share his story so that I could bring it into the Indopak scroll, Rafhan agreed to be sketched and filmed. We took ourselves to a quiet corner of the college. I began drawing but soon stopped, arrested by what he began describing of his experiences of persecution and imprisonment.11 My challenge in that moment and context became mediating life drawing with attending to Rafhan. In choosing to focus on looking and listening to him however I was not able to complete the sketch. Afterwards I found a solution in the recording we had made, whereby listening brought images to my mind. I sketched these out around the portrait I had made of Rafhan, and this strategy allowed me to develop the painting.

10

A pseudonym has been used to protect the identity of the subject. “Pakistan: Baloch People Fight for National Liberation,” RCIT Workers and Oppressed Unite, http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/asia/solidarity-with-balochistan/, accessed 28/09/2015.

11

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Rafhan. Initial sketch

Research into the combination of eye contact, facial expression, physical proximity and tone of voice has shown these to be significant factors contributing to the development of trust between persons. In the process of sketching Rafan all these things contributed to being able to obtain a level of detail, not in the original sketch, but in the sound recording that I had taken of Rafhan during this. In this way my process of developing the painting from the recording was greatly assisted by the attentive space and sense of connection generated during the portrait session. Although I had stopped my drawing, the depth to which my subject shared allowed me to produce an elaborate painting with only the barest of details sketched from life, showing me the importance place of listening with processes of portraiture and of building up a story. Developing paintings in ways involving listening was something I could do with subjects who spoke English, who could set time aside to talk, and who gave permission to be recorded. Reflecting on this I found it helpful to turn to Ronald J. Pelias’ ideas about personal relations and ‘leaning toward,’ which he suggests carries the greatest potential for meaningful interactions. “When I lean in, I am an attentive, listening presence, trying my best to become attuned with another person. I want to gather, pull in, understand. I want that person to know that I am present, ready to engage...sensitive to what they might need, alive to what they are trying to say, open to what they may share.”12 “Listening to others - getting beyond merely expressing ourselves – is the distinguishing feature of art in the empathic mode. When we attend to other people’s 12

Pelias, “Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relations,” 9.

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plight, enter into their emotions, make their conditons our own, identification occurs. Then we cannot remain neutral or detached observers: responsibility is felt and we are summoned to action. Rather than seeking to impress our own images upon the world, a radical art…is one that helps organise people who can speak for themselves but lack the vehicles to do so.”13 I listened, trying to get beyond the ‘mere expression of myself’. But I knew that whatever I made could not help in the way of a ‘radical art’ because the subject needed shielding and protection rather than a vehicle. Painting in this case was thus about acknowledging these limitations whilst not negating the importance of attending to and putting down stories for sharing later on.

Portrait of Rafhan. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Portrait of Rafhan available to authorised users. (Link).

Delays, Dis/advantages and Diversion: Painting a Community in Mardan Unexpected changes to my itinerary created opportunities to make other kinds of paintings. For example, as described in Bengal, spells of illness opened me to the stories of people who helped or cared for me, as well as to acts of self-storying. Other 13

Suzi Gablik, The Re-Enchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991). 112.

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kinds of delays stimulated painting by diverting me toward unplanned destinations and sometimes unanticipated waiting periods. In Pakistan my original plan had been to travel to the northern region of Hunza, a valley in the Himalayas, with the intention to paint about life in one of its deeply rooted communities situated on the Silk Route. This idea had come from thinking to tell stories about rootedness that, juxtaposed with others in the scroll about homelessness, could contribute to a larger meaning and story of belonging. Unfortunately the delays caused by my illness in Bengal meant that by the time that I arrived in Pakistan winter had settled in and areas such as Hunza had become difficult and also dangerous to access by road due to landslides. But while wondering where I would find the stories of a rooted community I was invited to give a drawing workshop in the town of Mardan four hours northwest of Lahore. Accepting, I found myself as a hosted teacher squarely in the midst of rural Khyber Pakhtunkhua with communities whose tribal presence in nearby Afghanistan is so ancient as to be mentioned in earliest Hindu scriptures.14

Mardan Pastoral Scene. Detail. Indopak

Taking my students for life drawing in places surrounding Mardan provided opportunities to sketch alongside them in the fields, and in villages. In the bazaars the small shops caught my eye; one of these, a dress shop, felt like an Aladdin’s cave, hung with jewel-bright lengths of cloth and stitched dresses. Six or seven shopkeepers, who I learned were all brothers, lounged on bolts of velvet cloth, pinching the handles of tiny cups of chai. Another shop took the form of a wagon piled with gigantic vegetables; and, as well as the local shoppers themselves inspired sketches and material for paintings.

14

Amin Saikal, “Afghanistan and Pakistan: The Question of Pashtun Nationalism?,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 30, no. 1 (2010): 5, 6.

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I was searching for vocabularies of ‘belonging’ and in Mardan I found these all around me. The cow dung patties that I saw drying on the walls of houses fascinated me, as they pointed to the rooted traditions of keeping buffalo and the commonality of ancient farming practices across the subcontinent. I noticed the arrangement of the patties changing from place to place, evoking a site specific kind of language. I found the idea that throughout the land people were still using these timeless methods to fuel fires and cook food exciting.15 Other practices sung out as symbolic, such as the process of boiling down sugar cane to create the rich brown chrystallised product known as gurr or jaggery. I spent time watching, filming, sketching, and also eating the delicious products of this process. In its pure form the brown gurr that I saw being made in Mardan has become hard to come by in the cities, and perhaps this was my sense when I sought to allude to it as precious, by rendering my gurr in gold leaf in the painting I later made in the scroll.

Gurr and Belonging in Mardan. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Gurr and Belonging in Mardan available to authorised users. (Link)

15

C. J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Universty Press, 2004), 12.

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In Mardan as I listened to the traditional music of the rabab played round the winter fire this too spoke to me of a timeless culture, which I sought to refer to in a painting of this ancient, beautiful instrument. In this way my unanticipated journey to Mardan with its experiences enabled me to generate paintings and find vocabulary to describe ‘topophilia’—the love and sense of connection people can have to their place. In the process it also gave me tangible understanding of the approach of the writer Freya Stark who built her travelogues around her own and similarly serendipitous experiences.16

Dresses to die for. Indopak. Detail

The fancy clothes in the dress shop full of brothers reminded me of a conversation I had had with a Pakhtun friend who boasted of attending ‘the wildest parties this side of world’ in the military compounds of Kabul. There, holed up in comparative luxury, foreign personnel passed their time outdoing each other in parties and extravaganzas. How had he got in, I asked enviously, for I harboured a wish to visit Afghanistan. He explained that Pakhtuns had managed to retain simultaneous rights to live in Pakistan as citizens and in Afghanistan as ethnic Afghanis. This status enabled them to cross the Pakistan-Afghanistan border without a visa, a freedom of which many took advantage.

16

Anna Suvorova, Lahore, Topophilia of Space and Place (Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2001), introduction.

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I found myself trying to imagine these parties, which my friend had described as Bacchanalian, flowing with alcohol and drugs, people wearing outlandish costumes or fabulous clothes, engaged in performances and crazy acts. I tried to represent these ideas in a painting but thought the result rather tame and more evocative of a high school disco.

A Subzi Wallah Near Mardan The Indian artist and teacher Abanindranath Tagore believed that miniature painting as a form held tremendous possibilities, if freed from the constraints of rigid institutionalisation. During his life he experimented extensively with the genre through eclectic cross-cultural fusion, bringing in influences and techniques drawn from his interactions with the pictorial traditions of other cultures, notably Chinese ink and wash techniques. Like Tagore, drawing from life by sketching in situ and mingling ways of painting that in traditional contexts seemed diametrically opposed was for me about exploring the possibilities of miniature as these were invoked across cultures, with respect for the often unexpected revelations and results that arrived. I experimented with mythologising subject encountered in life by evoking in my painting traditional languages of miniature. One of the ways I did this was by exploring vocabularies of ornament and pattern. I loved the delicate ornamentation and patterning to be found in miniatures created during the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Persia, especially in a set of illustrated manuscripts called the Shahnameh created for the Timurid Shah Muhammad Juki, and based on an epic poem written by the poet Abdul Qasim Firdausi Tusi. Different versions of the Shahnameh were commissioned by successive emperors through the ages, notably Ackbar the Great who is considered to be the greatest patron of the miniature genre. During his reign miniature experienced creative effusion and Ackbar’s Shahnameh is perhaps the most celebrated. But it was the illustrations for the Timurid Shahnameh that embodied the classical pictorial style of the Persian capital Herat, that interested me because of their especially minute scale, and delicacy of ornamental forms.

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A subziwallah near Mardan. Indopak. Detail

In Mardan I took the opportunity to make a sketch of the stall of a subzi wallah or vegetable seller. I admired the way this owner had arranged his vegetables and fruits, but I was also fascinated with the stall as an ephemeral structure. In its floating architecture I saw practicality, and sustainability, and beauty. This was the kind of light-footprint business to which I wanted to give attention through painting. Painting the stall, I wanted to imbue it with associations of beauty and specialness through making references to Miniature court painting and the Shahnameh Book of Kings. I decided to do this by inlaying the lifesketch I had made with floral ornamentation I had seen in a Timurid painting. But I struggled with creating something to the effect of this, even though I followed methods I had observed at the National College of Art. Those methods had involved the reproduction of ancient patterns and ornamentation through use of stencils and carbon paper. But when I tried these I was dissatisfied with the result which held a static, carbon-copy-like quality, and which I subsequently washed off.17 When I got back to Lahore I revisited the NCA library where I puzzled my problem with ornamentation by spending more time looking at reproductions of Timurid manuscripts. I had brought a magnifying glass so as to look at these more closely which was how I discovered that the faultlessness and symetry I had perceived actually held variation and imperfection. Many tiny flaws and asymmetries thus suggested that these patterns had been drawn freehand and not with stencils. The imperceptible

17

The thick watercolour paper of the scroll could take a certain amount of water. Washing a painting was done by holding a section of scroll under a stream of running water. Washing paper to erase paint was something I observed with the painter Anindita Bhattacharya who in the course of making a painting might wash her work away entirely several times.

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dents that these ‘mistakes’ made in the larger scheme of the painting attributed qualities similar to the way that the flaws and turns of pile in a silk Persian carpet add lustre and movement to the weave. When viewed from a distance these minuscule disruptions enriched and gave dimensions to the viewing experience. I realised that what I had mistaken for perfection in these miniatures was paradoxically the result of innate artistry and freehand drawing. The realisation prompted me to substitute the use of carbon paper and stencil, along with ideas of precision for the language of freehand drawing and painting when creating patterning and ornamentation in my scroll.

The Language of Absences Travelling and painting, there were many things that I noticed as I walked in places that I often found striking, bizarre, or poignant but which I did not paint about. This was partly as my intention with the scrolls was not to be informative, or provide exhaustive accounts of life. But it was also because absences formed their own kind of language in that they pointed to things to which I was not willing to lend the ultimate attention of painting. As an example, in the bazaars of Mardan with my drawing class I encountered many shops selling incredible arrays of weaponry. Inside them my eyes fell out of my head at their walls hung with every kind of instrument that could torture, maim or kill. I could have spent weeks documenting the different knives, grenades, guns, and accessories however ultimately I chose to not depict any of these shops or their contents in my scroll. Why did I not paint these shops with their evocative contents? Were these not also part of the life of place, along with the dress shop, the subzi wallah, the tailor, the clothes presser, and the barber? I stopped, because I thought about the ideas these paintings might to contribute to perceptions of Pashtun identity in Pakistan, India, Australia, and the wider world. I imagined how such images might fall in with pervasive ideas about Pashtuns, thereby dominating the alternative stories I was offering in the other paintings. Life in Khyber Pakhtunkua was complex but it was by no means all about guns or politics. I worried that painting the weapons shop might lend support to dominant narratives about the region and its people. I liked to think of the scroll as reflective of its time and of the places where it was made, but it was not like a newspaper in that the object was not reportage. Encounters with and processes of examining miniature paintings thought to be almost a thousand years old had instilled in me the idea that in using miniature my scrolls with their imagery could be physically enduring. If this was so, then I wanted the images that I was making to contribute to the larger story in the scrolls, and not to spectacles of a political, sensational, or dominant nature. Thus in Mardan as well as other places

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I visited I embraced this idea by being discerning about the material that I chose to paint.18

My Neighbour Omair

Omair, Willoughby, and the story of his Naani. Indopak. Detail

In Yazdani’s compound all the apartments lacked for particular components. Mine for example lacked a kitchen, but had a bath and running hot water. Actually this came out of the tap boiling and had to be carefully diluted with cold. In the flat next door lived Omair who at twenty eight had just moved out of home. His flat had a functioning kitchen but no hot water. When he kindly offered me to cook whenever I liked, I offered him access to the bathroom and the hot water and so was the beginning of our friendship. Over time, sharing spaces, food, and many cups of chai I got to know Omair and his story. His family had sent him to be trained as a mechanical engineer but Omair wanted to be a teacher, a profession that in Pakistan is not allocated great respect and which is poorly paid. However and following his heart, he had joined an NGO that had its offices nearby and which sent teams into Pakistan’s public schools to teach history. Omair was sympathetic when I complained about my lack of Urdu, and patiently explained many aspects of language and culture that had continued to 18

Carolyn Myss, Self Esteem and the Power of Your Choices (Sedona, Arizona: Myss.com, 2017), Workshop.

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mystify me. One day I asked him why my cross-border activities were regarded by ordinary people with such ambivalence. He explained that for decades Pakistan’s governmental and religious authorities had pushed for distorted versions of history to be taught in school. These versions contraversially cast Indian people prior to the Mughal invasions in a barbaric light, contradicting the reality not only of sophisticated pre-existing civilisations but of a commonality of ancestry and culture shared by many Pakistanis and Indians, and significantly, destroying senses of universality.19 I loved listening to Omair’s stories about his family. When his grandmother or Naani, after a lifetime of managing her own home in the village was finally persuaded to move with the family to their new house in the city, she set about trying to persuade the family to discharge the housemaid. “She’s a city girl, she doesn’t clean the toilet properly”, complained Naani. This was true—the maid hated cleaning the toilet and wouldn’t touch it. Whilst the family wouldn’t hear of dispensing with the maid who represented an important symbol of status, the maid asserted her own status by refusing to clean the toilet. Such attitudes infuriated Naani who accused the maid of putting on airs, saying “So you think you shit flowers?”.20 Omair grew interested in the work I was doing with Safia and her family and would come with me to the jhumpiri in his spare time. The rapport he established with her children and his assistance with translation made him invaluable. His genuine interest was refreshing and mattered to me. Prejudiced attitudes towards the Pakhiwas community meant that I often attracted criticism from people regarding the work I was doing, and there were few with whom I could share it. In my journal I wrote; Omair shares the food his mother brings from home. He reads Jane Austen novels to me as I paint in the scroll. He rearranges the furniture into fantastic shapes to hold up the fan that has fallen down and which Yazdani keeps forgetting to have fixed. Sometimes he camps it up and dances like a dervish through the room. His bed is missing boards and passing through on my way to the kitchen I can see him folded up accordian-style, fast asleep. My room in Lahore has no view, no warmth, and most of the time no light except when Omair is here. It may seem strange to include all these stories, many of which in keeping with the diarylike nature of the scrolls are personal. But they importantly reveal how the immersive and time-rich nature of the practice was influential as in allowing life to unfold. Life infiltrated and shaped the paintings I made. There was no invisible ‘fourth wall’ behind which I hid and so my story was not separate to the stories in the scroll, but part of its panoply. But as well the stories show the breadth of material that emerged in the course of nomadic practice with painting, and which, though I may not always have recognised this at the time, spoke diversely to the themes of non/belonging guiding my research.

19

Fatima Khan, “Historical Revisionism in Pakistani Textbooks: A Case Study of Public School Curriculum,” Scholedge International Journal of Multidisciplinary & Allied Studies ISSN 2394336X 5 (2018). 90–92. 20 A phrase such as this would have been spoken in Punjabi as Urdu is notoriously lacking in words for bodily functions.

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Dog in a Green Trenchcoat

Dog in a green trenchcoat. Detail. Indopak

Early on a winters morning I was walking back from Main Market having come from Jilani Park. The fog was thick and low when a dog stepped out of the mist, attired in a large green trench coat. There was something Humphrey Bogart about the dog who appeared urbane and at home in the coat with the collar turned up, though the sleeves were somewhat long for his front legs. He stepped elegantly over the road on his way somewhere, unconcerned at the picture he presented. I followed him a little way, noting how his appearance and attitude elicited little curiousity from the few people around who seemed to know him. He walked to Main Market where I lost him in the fog. I wondered who had given the dog the coat in which he looked so comfortable, and if they had dressed him, or whether he had dressed himself. As I discussed in Chap. 2 in context of interspecies connections, I sometimes encountered animals, plants or trees who in their demeanour or predicament elicited mystery or wonder, and consequently impulses to bring them into the scroll. I percieved these animals and plants as neither background elements nor as ‘flora or fauna’ but as folk—beings with their own ways, cultures and destinies, valid as those of any human. I would have liked to have worked with more stories of this kind but as with the dog who I lost in the fog, I found them challenging to follow. As well, the life of these subjects was often not only taking place on the margins of physical spaces, but during peripheral times, periods of day or night when activities were less likely to be disrupted by humans. To follow these stories would have required exchanging my diurnal life for one conducted on the fringes of daylight and well

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into the night which, due to existing commitments to subjects such as Safia and her family, was not possible at this time.

Safia’s Sewing Machine

Safia examining a sewing machine. Still from field documentary. 2014

I wanted to give Safia a gift to thank her for her contribution to my work. I had noticed that she sewed clothes as well as quilts and when I asked her if she would like a sewing machine her eyes lit up. In Pakistan old fashioned, hand-operated sewing machines are popular because they can be used during periods of load-shedding. With loadshedding the authorities sought to conserve electricty or bigily by cutting off the flow and it was common for whole suburbs to be without power for hours. As such times wealthier households turned on generators whilst in others activities requiring power and for appliances simply ceased. In jhuggi communities I had noticed the way that electricity was siphoned from lines being run from mains’ supplies to supply meager power to the tents, a difficult and extremely dangerous activity often resulting in tragic deaths through elecution. Smaller, more conspicuous and less protected communities such as Safia’s went without power, and Amanat relied on charging his mobile phone at his work. Machines that could be worked by hand were therefore valuable, a hand operated sewing machine being a good example. The old machines remain viable in Pakistan also because, unlike newer computerised models, these utilise simple mechanical systems which makes them easy to

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repair and maintain. In Main Market there were several shops selling machines. However the sight of my foreign face normally caused the average shopkeeper to triple his price, so when Safia and I went to look for a machine she instructed me to hang back for a while so that she could bargain more effectively. In one of the back streets was a shop selling refurbished old machines, some boasting famous names that I recognised; Bernina, Singer, Husqvarna, National, and even old Elnas—brands that once graced homes all over the world. My mother had owned such a machine in Australia, a black iron foot-pedalled Bernina on which she had stitched our curtains, clothing, and school uniforms. Safia found a machine she liked and having bargained hard for it, hoisted its sixteen kilos of iron and wood onto her head and set off down the road with me scrabbling after. As the film shows, it was a sight to see her striding with the machine balanced so, through the crowds of Main Market.

Safia’s Sewing Machine. Still from field documentary

The online version of this chaptercontains the field documentary Safia’s Sewing Machine available to authorised users. (Link) The next day I came to the jhumpiri with boxes of cotton thread and an enormous pair of scissors that I thought Safia would appreciate. I watched her re-oiling and cleaning the machine in a professional manner, before threading it to begin sewing. I sat and sketched her as she sewed at the machine, and we talked about sewing and about clothes. As I watched, I saw how she was creating a new dress using remnants from an older kameez or long dress. I drew closer to examine the machine which was a handsome black iron Singer, beautifully ornamented with scrolling enamel designs featuring flowers in gold, silver, and red. It was possibly more than forty years old but it ran like a dream.

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Safia at her sewing machine. Indopak. Detail

Sketching Safia and her sewing maching. Still from field documentary. 2014

Giving and Its Challenges

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Giving and Its Challenges Being with Safia and her family deepened the complexity of my practice. The privileges I embodied as a visitor and foreigner, that included benefitting from the disparate economies of Australian and Pakistan, set me apart as someone who was financially empowered. In my capacity as a researcher I budgeted for contributions in kind to Safia and her family. But I often felt powerless to negotiate the greater imbalances in the Pakistani social system. No matter what I contributed, forces seemed bent on keeping the family at a level of poverty that was seemingly unchangeable. Challenges for Safia and her family stemmed as previously mentioned, from the systemic marginalisation and oppression of the Pakhiwas tribe. I observed this manifesting in a variety of ways, one of which was the way that local people and authorities frequently interrogated Safia and her family as to what they were doing with me, showing me that her people were not considered as equal in the eyes of other Pakistanis. Engaging with the family thus meant that I needed to consider the consequences of my presence and actions. Even simple things such as buying a round of sugar cane juice for Safia’s children and their friends on an occasion when they had allowed me to follow them around filming and making drawings brought unwelcome attention from others, whose interference as I learned had the potential to cause the family trouble. I found the advice of anthropologists and ethnographic film makers invaluable in helping me work out how to contribute to Safia. Giving could potentially create difficulties for the community whose life on the street meant that others could see what they gained materially from our interaction. This was why I decided to make my contributions always in kind. The family had no bank account or secure place for keeping money, which when they had it, they had a tendency to spend immediately. Should they be seen to suddenly be spending larger than normal sums, this might have attracted notice, and further problems from people including the owner of the plot, the police, and the city council who regularly took opportunities to extort payments from the family.

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Tea with Hina

Tea with Hiba. Detail. Indopak. Tea with Hiba. Audio. 2015

One evening I was travelling back to Gulberg and got chatting in the minibus with a young woman whose name was Hiba. Though not her stop, Hiba jumped off spontaneously with me. It was winter, rain was coming down, and freezing puddles lay over the road. Hiba was clothed head to foot in velvet velour which looked fabulous but gave no warmth and she was shivering. I asked her if she would like a cup of tea and she jumped at the invitation, saying that she had not had the chance to talk with a foreigner before. I made tea in Omair’s kitchen and brought it to my room. Hiba began telling me of her experiences with being a working girl in Lahore. I asked if I could draw her portrait and record our conversation. She agreed and for the next two hours shared much about her work, her dreams, and the challenges she faced as she sought things that for women in Pakistan often seemed to contradict one another; home, love, and self-direction. My name is Hiba and the person whom I love is named Waleed Iqbal. But he don’t love me. When I saw him first time I suddenly fall in love with him at first sight. He don’t love me, but sometimes I feel he loves me but he is pretending to be not in love with me. But I can feel that he loves me a lot. He cares me but for some reason he is not paying me the attention. I think he is very much frightened of his wife. I pray to Allah that he will become mine, Inshallah.21 This is a very daring thing which I am doing right now because most of the females in Pakistan don’t live alone. Because there are some things which I cannot 21

Inshallah commonly translates as “God willing”.

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compromise on. I was having some clashes with my brothers - thats the reason why I decided to quit home, and my mother told me “Hiba, I cannot live without my children so I have to part from you. So I told her, it’s okay you can stay with them, I can live alone myself. The life of working women most of the time is very hard because you have to face the humiliation of co-workers. They don’t give you the respect, they just ditch you, they want to exploit you. They say “You’re looking so beautiful ma’am, why don’t you get married? You are 27, 28 years old! Why aren’t you getting married? Are you gay? Do you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend somewhere? They want to exploit the females because they want to get their big points and then they’re going to pressurise the woman, and say that you’re having a boyfriend and I’m going to tell your father or your mother or brother that you’re going on dates. You can’t even imagine the mentality of Pakistani boys. Most of the Pakistani boys perceive their wives, their mothers, and their sisters as like an angel. Nobody has a right to even have bad words about them…If I have a co-worker he’s not going to give me the respect I am deserving. He’s going to give more respect to his family; to his mother, wife, and sisters. They just perceive that a girl who is outside is not a good girl, that she has a character deficiency, that she doesn’t have a strong character.22 Hiba talked for several hours. I listened, made cups of tea, showed Hiba the scroll, and sketched her portrait. At last she said it was time to leave, we hugged, and I wished her well. Developing Hiba’s portrait I thought of issues she had raised concerning objectification, exploitation, abandonment, and lack of a voice. I had not made multiple sketches, aware of the limited space of the scroll, and searched for ways to expand the meaning of my single sketch. I found myself embellishing the drawings I made of Hiba’s handbags. Ideas with this came as I recollected the way I had seen women in full burqa accessorise with large, brightly coloured and ornate ‘statement’ bags. When all of a woman remained concealed in black but for her eyes and bag, her bag became a key avenue of expression, and as such bags of every colour and shape, often wildly ornamented, could be found in Lahore’s fashionable shops. Eyes, the other avenue of expression permitted by the burqa made me think of truck art in Pakistan. I would often see on the backs of trucks and buses paintings of long-lashed eyes. Symbolically paintings of eyes were believed to be auspicious, offering both driver and contents of truck or bus protection from another kind of eye, the ‘evil eye’. The evil eye is a broadly used term but in Pakistan it may be understood as the general misfortune that can issue from human and non-human influences. I found eye paintings fascinating for these meanings and for the inferences they offer about the ubiquitous, utilitarian, hard-working and often dangerously overloaded vehicles that trundled Lahore’s highways.23

22

Hina. Interview by author. (Gulberg, Lahore). 2014. Elias, Jamal J. “On Wings of Diesel: Spiritual Space and Religious Imagination in Pakistani Truck Decoration.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 43 (2003): 187–202. 193.

23

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The Chickens

Chickens and Woodpecker. Indopak. Detail

In Pakistan, as a vegetarian I was conscious of living a culture very concerned with meat eating. Meat was considered an essential part of the diet and eating it was religiously significant, and a sign of status. The animals themselves had differing status. Sheep and goats seemed to receive humane and respectful treatment at least up until slaughter, but the animal most commonly eaten, the chicken, did not. Senses about this began during one of my first trips to Lahore whilst walking down a street. Feeling crunching below my feet I looked down in horror to find myself treading on the heads of hens which had been thrown as rubbish on the footpath.24 In the bazaar near Yazdani’s where I had found Puppi were one or two shops that sold fresh chicken meat. Each morning live chickens would be delivered in a large truck. They would be packed into small cages by the front of the shop or held in a sack of netting hung to the ground from a beam or hook. Thus constrained the chickens would wait, sometimes all day, until they were killed and the smell of these enclosures was overpowering.

24

It is customary for butchers in Lahore to throw meatscraps to the kites, the lesser eagles that abound in the skies above the city, however as heads are not eaten, even by kites, the placement of the remains did not suggest this logic.

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The chickens were slaughtered on a block positioned near their enclosure which meant they could see each kill. The sight of this always stopped me in my tracks. At times the chickens’ zombie-like state made me wonder if they were in shock and had already left their bodies. But then I would see a hen being pulled from the cage by her wings, and watch her come to life to protest with pitiful squawks. Once killed, the body was hacked into pieces before the enclosure containing the live chickens. Such executions, conducted continuously through the day, upset me conducted as they were in a senseless, unnecessary cruelty. I broached the treatment of chickens with people to find out how they felt about this aspect of culture and learned that many agreed that the present process was inhumane. Some commented that the killing of an animal in sight of its brethren was un-Islamic, and some said the conditions should be changed. But I found no one interested in taking active steps to challenge this mode of practice. And I lacked sufficient confidence and abilities with language to take the matter up on my own. I took to standing opposite the chicken shops, making sketches of them in their net. I sensed the eyes of the men working in the shop on me, but I kept my distance, hesitant to initiate conversation. I did not want them to think that I disproved of them and their work, preferring that they simply see and perhaps consider my focus with the chickens. The painting I developed did not capture any sense of the treatment that chickens underwent. I couldn’t bear to illustrate this—it was as much as I could do to stand and simply witness their waiting. Sketching as a process was intense and horrible, but revelatory. At first the birds had appeared as an indistinct mass formed of dirty feathers, beaks, and legs. Then slowly they began to separate into birds again, with details and distinguishing features. In these details I found their individuality, and in some cases even something of their personalities such that in those moments they became for me, though perhaps not for themselves, chickens again.

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The Girl in the Rickshaw

The girl in the rickshaw. Detail. Indopak

In Pakistan activities with storying Safia and the life of her community had become a focus of my work. To remain close to them I continued renting my room in the home of Mr. Yazdani. Though the rent was high by ordinary standards, the room had been poorly constructed and was impossible to heat. In it I was always freezing. It was also often without electricity such that night and day I relied on candlelight to paint. Though grateful for the use of Omair’s kitchen, this too was not ideal. These inconveniences, together with Yazdani’s frequent intrusions sometimes found me venturing out to nearby suburbs to investigate alternative renting options. One day I went to look at rooms in nearby Model town, known for its beautiful gardens and genteel demographic profile. Omair had come with me but after viewing some decrepit, exorbitantly priced rooms we had given up. We were climbing into the rickshaw we had hired to head back to Gulberg when a young woman came running down the road, bareheaded and barefoot. She sprang into the cab and began exhorting the driver to move on.

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The girl looked extremely frightened and I tried to ask her what was wrong. “Help me!” she cried in Urdu, “help me get away!” I told the driver to go to Gulberg but he did nothing. His face, stony in the mirror, told me that he was not having any part of this. The girl had begun to weep and shiver. I put my arm around her as Omair tried to question her gently. As she pleaded again with the driver to move on, we became aware that our rickshaw had been surrounded by a large group of men and women. Two of the women who turned out later to be the girl’s aunts forced themselves inside whereupon they began abusing the girl, screaming at her, slapping her face, and punching her body. Some blows landed on me as the girl tried to bury herself in my side. From what was being said to the girl, Omair was able to gather a sense of the story. It seemed that she had married against the wishes of her family and that the man was Christian. Finding herself pregnant, she and her husband made a plan to run away. But before they could, the family discovered their marriage and the pregnancy. They had locked the girl in a room and arranged for an abortion. Her husband had disappeared and she feared that they had harmed him. The abortion had been scheduled for today, and in desperation the girl had tried to escape. With no plan or friends to turn to, she had simply slipped out of the house and begun running. In the struggle between the aunts, myself, and other members of her family, I worried that the girl would be torn apart. She clung to me screaming and crying but force prevailed and she was dragged from the rickshaw and into a police paddywagon. Unable to help, I kept watching as the vehicle doors closed on the girl, and was followed by the group away down the street. At some point the wagon stopped at what I guessed was the house from which she had tried to escape, and the street was quiet again. Omair and I found another rickshaw and rode back to Gulberg. We sat in my electricity-less room, silent and in shock. We knew there was no recourse to the law or to an intervening body. We knew also that had we somehow managed to get the girl away, there would have been the question of where to take her. Omair had told me of his firsthand experiences with Pakistan’s so-called ‘women’s refuges’ and their complicity with regard to ‘honour killing’. At one time he had assisted his uncle, a school teacher, so that a student could escape an abusive family. The student’s family was able to gain information from the refuge that lead them to Omair’s uncle, whom they subsequently murdered, after which they pursued Omair. Omair, his parents, and his siblings had had to flee their home and go into hiding. Though the murderer was later charged and imprisoned, the fact was that in Pakistan the law offered no protection to victims of abuse or those trying to assist them. The incident brought depression and doubt for me. I wondered what I was doing in a society and a culture about which I felt I understood less each day. But feeling bewilderment about culture was not new; I had experienced it when I encountered the pot of bad luck in Baroda. I had felt similar confusion in Canberra observing homeless people freezing in a city of empty heated offices and luxury hotels. I had felt it in

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Hunchy observing depressions in the grass that signified places where huge trees had once stood, and where the indigenous people had once gathered to harvest the fruit of their later-destroyed Bunya forests. Perhaps in Pakistan my encounter with the runaway girl brought on a stage of culture shock described by Karlervo Oberg during which, as he suggests, the scales begin to fall from the eyes of the visitor, but it was a stage for which I had been unprepared.

Remembering, Resistance, and Survival “Each day as I walked to work I discretely measured the assembly courtyard…At night by candle light I made my drawings. When I’d finished I’d tear them into tiny shreds that I hid in case of a night raid…when I was in exile in Denmark I drew those places again as if I’d known them all my life. That is memory.”25 Remembering can be a form of resistance, and a way of surviving trauma. This was the sense of architect Miguel Lerner who, on whatever scraps of paper he could find, made accounts of life in the concentration camps of Pinochet through drawing. His drawings helped him to survive and to stay sane. Ultimately Lerner’s drawings have also provided the people of Chile with records of places and of the horrors that went on in them that can now never be forgotten. Making images about the girl in the rickshaw offered me a way in which to try to process and remember this experience. Doing so was also about connecting the story of the girl within a wider panoply of experience. The impulse of the storyteller is to unify humanity through the universality and particularity of collected experiences. But as well, and similar to the use of drawing by Lerner, it was also about resisting senses of powerlessness that in my case threatened to overwhelm. I did not attempt to paint out a fuller story about the girl. This was something I could never know and about which I did not want to surmise. I accepted that some stories remain inconclusive or fragmented, that in this lay their innate poignancy. I had been given a piece of a puzzle to carefully keep was all, and like Miguel Lerner, the capacity to remember it through an image.

25

Miguel Lawner “The architect” in Patricio Guzman et al., “Nostalgia for the Light,” (London: New Wave films, 2010).

No-Man’s Land

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No-Man’s Land

Stuck in Gurgaon. Detail. Indopak

In July 2014 I boarded the Indo-Pakistan bus in Lahore, bound for Delhi to catch my flight to Brisbane. However when I arrived at the airport and immigration counter I was prevented from proceeding to the gate due to a problem with my visa. More than one researcher had shared with me their difficulties in obtaining an official Research visa for India. In my case the consulate had issued a Study visa which was problematic as by assuming study it required the presentation of a ‘Leaving Certificate’ upon exit. In vain I had tried to communicate this to the consulate and to request a Research visa. Unfortunately my concerns were rebuffed and as I was unable to further delay my departure for fieldwork, I had accepted the Study visa and travelled on. Now however, not being able to provide a Leaving Certificate meant that I was forced to stay and apply for an exit permit to leave India. This process brought attention to my cross-border activities, further complicating my application, and extending the wait period. Though staff at the ANU were understanding and supportive, their efforts alone could not hasten the pace of Indian bureacracy. I counted myself fortunate in having time left on my visa, enough to ensure that my presence in the country would remain legal. In the two months wait period that ensued however

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my challenge became resisting the temptation to spend all my time running from consulate to Police Station. As circumstances these encouraged me to turn to painting as a means by which to negotiate the uncertainty creatively by channeling my anxieties and worries through painting.

Days of waiting. Indopak. Detail

Anindita whose painting practice I had been observing in the previous weeks, took pity on me and invited me to stay on with her whilst I was confined to Gurgaon. I asked if I might continue to work in her studio and observe her work with papercut or jali. Soon, and with her encouragement I began learning this tradition. Absorbing and challenging, papercut became a way of channelling my anxiety. I began with simple designs, progressing to more complex ones so that by the end of two months in addition to my diary paintings, I had produced several intricate pieces. Additionally, learning with Anindita brought opportunities for artistic exchange as whilst teaching me to cut paper she became interested in the William Morris designs that I had employed within the scroll. I shared my sources of Morris designs and literature which Anindita went on to explore as vocabularies in her own work with patterning, papercut and painting.

Cowgirls of Gurgaon

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Cowgirls of Gurgaon

Cowgirls of Gurgaon. Detail. Indopak

In Gurgaon I found a park nearby Anindita’s apartment block. It was called Huda Biodiversity Centre and though its biodiverse nature was questionable, there was diversity in those who came to its green. Most descended from the apartment towers each morning and evening to walk away the tension collected behind their workdesks. But one group of visitors struck me with their rustic appearance. They were all women, quite elderly, and dressed in a traditional Haryana style of full sleeved blouses and long skirts rather than saris. They came daily to pick grass in the park. Oblivious to all but their own company, the women would walk to a spot where the lawn had grown out. They would tie the corners of their chuddar, a large dupatta, around their head so that its length hung out like a huge sack. Then they would squat and move, picking grass and throwing it over their shoulders into the chuddar until it was full. With full chuddars, the women would rise and balance the bag of grass, now a gigantic mushroom-like form, on their heads before sallying back through the park and out through the gates. The dignity and bearing with which the women carried themselves, and the disdain with which they regarded the wardens and general public exercising on the jogging track intrigued me. Their attitude conveyed a sense of ownership. The looks they cast me as I shuffled passed in rather shabby shorts were scathing and sometimes they spat at me. These women were not doing the work of park attendents with the job of cutting grass.

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I asked Anindita and her friends about the grasscutters. Megha, who came from a family who had lived in the area for several decades told me that the women very probably hailed from the original village of Gurgaon, from which the city took its name. The families of their village had released inherited lands to developers over the years. But though the fields might be lost beneath apartment blocks and shopping malls, the villagers and their descendants had stayed, and had kept hold of their herding culture and their cows. With money from the land sales they had built houses but without land for pasture, the cows now lived with them in the home. “They will never give up their cows”, said Megha. “Whatever it takes to keep their cows happy and giving milk, they will do.” For the women this meant picking grass enough to feed the cows daily, and which they were doing by some agreement with the municiple council in Huda Park. From then on the sight of the women filling their chuddars and transporting the huge grass bundles filled me with respect. Whatever they thought of me, I saw significance in their holding to their culture, and found myself hoping that they would continue to exercise their right to the grass of Gurgaon for as long as they wished.

The Art of Border Crossing

Border crossing. Indopak. Detail

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The Indopak scroll by this time held some serious creases and needed repairing. Thinking about how best to do this provided another means of redirecting uncertainty regarding my visa. I decided to use some of the paper cuts I had made in Anindita’s studio as supports for the creases. Pasted over, the supports created demarcated areas in the scroll. As I looked at these I thought of the border I had recently crossed, and its heavily militarised ‘no-man’s land’. Going with this idea I used the spaces to make a series of paintings about the Indo-Pakistan border, which also served as a metaphor for the personal no-man’s land in which I waited. The Indo-Pakistan border began gathering meaning for me when I started coming and going between Baroda and Lahore for study in Miniature during my Masters. I always travelled overland because I was on a tight budget, but in time I did so also because I found the process of negotiating the border by land and connecting with its physicality meaningful. There was no ‘storytelling visa’ and my frequent crossing brought questions, sometimes suspicion, and often lengthy, frustratingly bureacratic, and at times nerve-wracking processes. Crossing stimulated conversations with people on each side many of whom I found expressed fascination and desire to know about life on the other side. The lop-sided, often distorted, and sensationalist nature of the news made people curious to know what I had personally experienced and seen. People shared their own stories of the border with me. Sometimes the stories were lighthearted, such as one that a friend told me about his father, a painter, who in the nineteen seventies strolled with a friend, another artist to the border where they proceeded to talk their way over to the other side without a visa. But many of the stories were about loss and separation, as they touched the painful past of Partition. These stories had the effect of making me conscious of the privilege I had regarding the capacity to cross this particularly hermetic border. Navigating borders such as this one through painting was therefore not only about meditating on the colonial past, but was about creatively protesting the border itself as a structure of disruption and disconnection. I found the Indo-Pakistan border fascinating and disturbing. The border was like a temple in some ways, replete with its own culture, rituals, pilgrims, and devotees. Each afternoon at five o’clock it would erupt with ceremonial events as people flocked to it on both sides in fervours of nationalism. The Indian and Pakistani soldiers performed ritualised marching of the guard and closing of the huge gates at either end of the no-man’s land. To add to the spectacle each country had selected its tallest officers to perform the ritual steps that included kicks higher than the helmets on their own heads. In Anindita’s studio I looked at miniature paintings of fighting camels. Their necks, twisted and interlinked, offered a metaphor for the situation of India and Pakistan. With care I painted and cut out an image based on these, pasting it in the border section.

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As I developed this section I thought of the English graffiti artist and activist Banksy and murals he made on the Israel-Palestine wall.26 I thought of the psychological wall that raised itself during times when I had suggested to friends in India and Pakistan to make the journey with me. The mixed reactions this elicited had shown me the effect of the lies and propoganda each nation told its people. Such resistance had had the effect increasing my determination to make these journeys which though not paintings, like other intangible art products of this nomadic practice, carried energy and were impactful. I tell you I am going over the border and your eyes widen. When I invite you to come with me I can see a sudden joy flood through you, and you almost jump up and down with excitement. Yes! You almost shout. We begin to make plans. But then I see a strange mood comes over you. Your eyes glaze over it seems, with the lies they have told you. I boil more tea, and tell you again that the propaganda is not true, that the people over the border have worries, concerns, and endure oppression as you do. I pull out the scrolls and show you paintings of roti, round like the ones you make, perhaps a bit larger, and their buffalo that are brown and blue eyed like yours. I describe how they pat the dung into shapes to dry as you do. Listen to these songs, these are like yours, full of fairies and djinns, aspirations, fears and dreams. But it is no good. They have carried out their indoctrination too well. You cannot come, you sigh, and say “It is impossible.” And so I make the trip again, as I have before, alone.

26

Vishwajyoti Ghosh, ed. This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition; an Anthology of Graphic Narratives from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2013).; Raziye Akkoc, “Banksy in Gaza: Street Artist Goes Undercover in the Strip,” The Telegraph 2016.

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Banksy, Art Attack. Palestine. 2005. Acrylic on concrete wall. 3000 × 4000 cm (approximate dimensions). In Banksy in Gaza: Street Artist Goes Undercover in the Strip, Raziye Akkoc, The Telegraph, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/banksy/11436286/Banksy-in-Gaza-Street-art ist-goes-undercover-in-the-Strip.html

No Sense of an Ending

Final images in the Indopak scroll

In the first week of August 2014, having obtained the permission to leave, I boarded the plane in Delhi and flew back to Australia. Back in Hunchy, I found myself in the final stages of painting the Indopak scroll. As with the beginning, ending the scroll was about responding instinctively to circumstances and events rather than achieving a planned outcome. Consequently, the last series of images conveys a sense of ‘no ending’ as in Hunchy my attention was caught up with portraying the dramatic change of scene. With only thirty centimetres remaining in the scroll I found myself packing in information as I followed my impulse to keep responding, making use of the momentum that had developed over the journey and embracing the idea of the scroll as a space of continuing reflection. At this time my sister was in the process of translating the diaries of our grandfather Artur from German into English. Amongst the translated extracts that she showed me, this entry struck me; I witnessed a small incident on the street: A poor man gave comfort to a poor boy, a stranger. The boy sat on the curbstone crying desperately, the nut cake seller noticed him as he was going by, quickly put up his stand, placed open the countertop, cut off a small piece of nut cake, pressed it into the boy’s hand; the child stared at

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it with astonishment, forgot about crying, gulped the cake down, went on. All this happened in absolute seriousness. No word was spoken. I stood still and stared helplessly in my utter internal complicity at the wailing child, incapable of acting; then I beheld it - the whole simple episode. I needed to reflect on it. Rather, I looked for the connection: Why has what I saw touched me deeply inside, why have two people touched me there on the street, where I must be getting lonelier. Why has the joy of this small happening broken through all the walls that over time within me have formed life’s divisions. Artur Glikson. Diary. Circa 1950. Exact date unknown. The entry revealed something of the grandfather who I never knew, core to his inner life. Significantly it offered me a perspective on the struggles I had experienced with developing a connective aesthetic in my art practice. Artur’s sense of estrangement as the onlooker, yearning for connection yet somehow unable to pierce the walls of ‘utter complicity’ struck a chord. I thought of the many situations I had found myself in during my travels where empathy had asked me to confront and break down similar such walls and complicities. As Artur had written, to only be a witness was to be imprisoned in the role of the stranger, and at the heart of loneliness. In this light the Bengali idea of the artist as two birds, the one who lives and the one who observes, seemed to me to want for a third dimension. I saw how painting with the methodologies I had been using had often offered opportunities through which to transcend this sense of loneliness, if I could only keep overcoming those reservations or fears which Artur in his time had found so difficult to surmount. In Hunchy I tried to ground my sense that the journey had finished and that I had “returned” by sorting through personal possessions I had stored at my mother’s house. Going through a bag of clothes one day I found trousers that had belonged to Artur, tailored some seventy years ago and in excellent condition. I marvelled at the craftsmanship that evoked an ethos and an epoch of handmaking. I put them on and as I wandered about had a peculiar feeling of being clad in time rather than cloth. I rolled out the scroll and found a space in which to sketch them. Developing the painting, I drew a kangaroo in the act of climbing out of the trousers. It was a self portrait, as well as a way of referring to the grandfather who in his diaries had left a gift of insight. But the image was also a way of trying to express my sense of climbing out of and leaving behind the past, the journey. It was Spring, a time of the year when life was renewing. Though my journey had in practical terms all but ended, I found myself resisting the idea and kept trying to pour all I saw into the remaining inches of paper. Perhaps also change, that consistent dimension of nomadic painting that asks to be accounted for pulled me to keep painting. Walking along Hunchy road I found puffy native passionfruit seeds overhanging the fences, in the garage a nesting diamond-backed python, and there were tiny green nymphs that hopped in and out of the house. When I finally raised my head and read the news, political decisions to permit drilling for gas on the Great Barrier Reef motivated me to create a grotesque tiny caricature of then Prime Minister Tony Abbot. Politics pulled my thoughts back to India, prompting in a space near the figure of Abbot a caricature of Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. I found myself thinking

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of the triangle of Australia, India, Pakistan and the angles into which I had tried to fit myself as a nomadic painter, and as a person. I was grateful to have been released from the visa limbo I had occupied in Gurgaon, but with this came a sense of loss, and of feeling lost between the spaces of Australia, India, and Pakistan, and now in Hunchy with its ghosts. I realised that as a storyteller I had become used to being on the move, and to social, immersive dynamics for meaning and motivation in my practice. In the part of Australia to which I had returned, I was in a radically different cultural space, and I realised how much my way of working was bound up with the cultural spaces it had evolved in over the past few years. Making these last paintings had the effect of giving me a feeling of being more “between” than at a point of arrival. I had a sense not so much of my journey ending, rather that my way of working was about to change yet again. Perhaps this is the way of nomadic painting, which I had set out to explore, and which I was now living out in practice. What I still had not realised was the degree to which transition was innate to a nomadic way of working. And that transition and change still took me by surprise, remaining challenging, and at times painful. At the end of the Australind scroll the original marbling had created a serendipitous mark on the paper forming an enclosed space. The space invited an image but as this was the last space in the scroll I dithered, wondering what to paint. So much it seemed was left that needed to be expressed, and just this one little space. I decided to wait. It was spring and walking along Hunchy Road one day I saw a moorhen out and about with its newly hatched dark and fluffy chick. The tiny bird struck me as a symbol of beginnings, and as soon as I got back from the walk I made a painting of the two within the space of the mark. Positioned thus the parent hen and its chick looked as if they were about to head off on a walk over the edge of the scroll, suggesting that the journey is ongoing and that the scroll was not a closed work.

Post Field I continued working on the scrolls for another year. Across the three scrolls, more so Australind and Indopak, paintings sat in various stages of completion. Some were still as sketches, others were semi painted, and there were some that although fully painted lacked that sense of completion that comes with time and the space of reflection. It is sometimes thought that for a diary to be true, it cannot continue to be worked post events, but as Philippe Lejeune suggests, the diary keeper is quite capable of crafting and honing an entry whilst staying true to the initial impulse, as a set of experiences to be shared with others, and this sense I followed.27 Though I was back in Australia, to all extents familiar territory, and now had a more stable and comfortable base, I felt that I occupied a liminal space. The sense of being ‘between’ cultures prevailed, accompanied by that of the journey not having really ended. Practically, I found my pace of painting much slowed. The energy 27

Lejeune, On Diary. 47, 58.

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of movement, the “out there phase” contracted as the phase of introspection and interiority, the space of filling out and completing paintings, took over. There was also the way that the scrolls allowed for reflections on the passage of time through their chronology and unravelling physicality. The pictures caught at me. Coming across a sketch or painting would fill me with memories and associations such that I struggled to attend to the present and my task of completing the scrolls. When the scrolls were finally complete, I wondered if their exhibition at the university might bring that elusive sense of an ending. In anticipation of this I arranged my space in the gallery with care; Safia’s quilt lay on a dais, the Australind scroll lay fully rolled out on a specially designed shelf. I had asked for a computer at which people could sit, to allow for their interaction with a virtual tour integrating all three scrolls with sound compositions and films. The remaining scrolls were displayed in perspex boxes such as the one I had had made in Baroda. I had stationed these on low platforms with cushions and magnifying glasses at hand, to encourage people to sit eastern-style and engage with the work. The sense of ending however did not arrive. The scrolls with their beginnings that picked up where the last scroll had left off, and their endings that seemed to suggest the journey had merely paused and was ongoing, spoke of an open-ended practice. Like a documentary film maker or ethnographer, I was continuing to live with the people whose stories populated the scrolls and for which the paintings served to remind of the bonds forged between us.

Postscript Since completing the Australind Archive, some of the people with whom I spent time and whose stories came into the scrolls have left the world. One is Biblab’s father Nirmalendu, who sat with me over salted tea and warm silences. His slight frame sits in the scroll, wrapped in the pale blue lunghi, his eyes luminous and prescient seem to me to be still looking out to, and full of, life. Another person who has left is Saurav. Saurav had nursed me in Kolkata when I was ill. In my mind I can still see him hovering over me as I am lying in the bed, stubbornly resisting the spoonfuls of soup he patiently holds to my mouth. It seems inconceivable to me that his feet, which float in the scroll near my head as he and Biblab exhort me to enter a hospital, are no longer standing in Kolkata. There are others who have come into the worlds of people who are depicted in the scrolls. When I learned that Susuma Chitrakar had had her fourth baby, I looked at the paintings I made about her and her family. I realised that in those moments of immersion I had given no thought to how those pictures and the worlds they represented might fill out in time. Immersive moments, moments of empathy, and of connectedness continue to add dimensions to questions that stimulated this book concerning the form and function of peripatetic painting. The pictures themselves even as ‘imaginal worlds’ do not

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account for this developing other sense that the connections forged through the practice are expanding rather than contracting with time. Such senses keep me wondering about the nature of a nomadic way with painting even as they find me connected me with and bonded to those persons, animals, plants, and places which I painted.

The Indopak scroll in its display box with a viewer during the Australindopak Archive exhibition. 2017

References Banksy, Art attack. Palestine. 2005. Acrylic on concrete wall. 3000 x 4000 cm (approximate dimensions). In Banksy in Gaza: Street artist goes undercover in the strip, Raziye Akkoc, The Telegraph, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/banksy/11436286/Banksy-in-Gaza-Street-artist-goesundercover-in-the-Strip.html Berger, John. 2005. Berger on drawing. Aghabullogue, Co Cork, Ireland: Occasional Press. www. occasionalpress.net. Butt, Waqas H. 2019. Beyond the abject: Caste and the organisation of work in Pakistan’s waste economy. International Labour and Working-Class History 95, Spring: 18–33. Erlich, Pippa, and James Reed. 2020. My octopus teacher. 1:25mins. South Africa: Netflix. Fuller, C.J. 2004. The camphor flame: Popular hinduism and society in India. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Universty Press. Gablik, Suzi. 1991. The re-enchantment of art. New York: Thames and Hudson. Ghosh, Vishwajyoti, ed. 2013. This side, that side: Restorying partition; an anthology of graphic narratives from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh. New Delhi: Yoda Press.

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Khan, Fatima. 2018. Historical revisionism in Pakistani textbooks: A case study of public school curriculum. Scholedge International Journal of Multidisciplinary & Allied Studies 5: 89. ISSN 2394-336X. MacDougall, David. 1982. Unprivileged camera style. Rain 50 (50): 8–10. Myss, Carolyn. 2017. Self esteem and the power of yocr Choices. Sedona, Arizona: Myss.com. Workshop. Ormsby-Stoddard, Patricia. 2014. Fabric of belonging: Exotic quilts from Pakistan and India exhibition, June 27-November 29. Collection of Patricia Ormsby-Stoddard. http://www.moa.byu.edu/ fabric-of-belonging/. Pakistan: Baloch people fight for national liberation. RCIT Workers and Oppressed Unite. http:// www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/asia/solidarity-with-balochistan/. Saikal, Amin. 2010. Afghanistan and Pakistan: The question of Pashtun nationalism? Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 30 (1): 5–17. Suvorova, Anna. 2001. Lahore, Topophilia of space and place. Pakistan: Oxford University Press. Tidwell, Tara. 2001. Uru life more than a tourist attraction. Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine September.

Appendix

Keep Hidden From Me Rachel Korn. trans. Carolyn Kizer Keep hidden from me. Keep from me all that I might comprehend! O God, I ripen toward you in my unknowing. The barely burgeoning leaf on the roadside tree Limns innocence: here endeth the first lesson. Keep from me, God, all forms of certainty: The steady tread that paces off the self And forms it, seamless, ignorant of doubt Or failure, hell-bent for fulfilment. To know myself: is that not the supreme disaster? To know Thee, one must sink on trembling knees. To hear Thee, only the terrified heart may truly listen; To see Thee, only the gaze half-blind with dread. Though the day darken, preserve my memory From Your bright oblivion. Erase not my faulty traces. If I aspire again to make four poor walls my house, Let me pillow myself on the book of my peregrinations. God, grant me strength to give over false happiness, And the sense that suffering has earned us Your regard.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Glikson, Peripatetic Painting: Pathways in Social, Immersive, and Empathic Art Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4005-6

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Elohim! Though sorrow fill me to the brim, Let me carefully bear the cup of myself to Thee. Formative Experiences as a Tourist in Indian-Occupied Kashmir, 2004 Travelling in North India in 2004 I stayed for some time in the hill town of Mcleod Ganj. There I made friends with brothers Sadiq and Ashiq who ran a tiny jewellery shop, ‘Dreaming Star’.1 Each year for two weeks during the coldest month when no tourists came, Sadiq and Ashiq would take the opportunity to visit their family in Sri Nagar, the capital of Kashmir. When Sadiq invited me along, I jumped at the chance. With his family I experienced life as entwined with culture, which was very different to the way I had been travelling previously as a tourist. Staying with Sadiq’s family meant surrendering to a large degree the autonomy I had enjoyed as a solo backpacker. As a guest I was not permitted to traverse the streets alone, and as the home was small and space was shared amongst twelve people, I found not being able to wander freely outside challenging. The family took all their meals together, and everybody ate the same food. There were traditions and rules about how to sit, how to wash hands, how to eat, and also how to dress. Concepts such as vegetarianism, eating outside of mealtimes, or not wanting to to eat certain foods were percieved by the family as odd. Staying with the family was for me an introduction to the methodology of immersion as I learned what it meant, if only for a brief while, to willingly forgo habits, predilections, and also assumptions. Significantly, with Sadiq’s people I experienced great kindness, warmth, and tolerance. They shared with me their culture, involved me in their festivities and celebrations, forgave my ignorances, and hugged me fiercely when I left. My final impressions of the family were of their kindly, careworn faces, the streets of their beautiful city that had been reduced to rubble, and the frightening and oppressive presence of the Indian military. The experience had the effect of bonding me to the family, keeping me mentally and emotionally engaged with them and with their region. Getting to the Location of the Earthquake When I travelled to the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir it was with the idea of offering to volunteer with cleanup after the earthquake. Unfortunately I travelled with a high level of ignorance. I spoke no Urdu, had no internet phone with in-country contacts, nor did I possess a good political, cultural, or geographical understanding of the region. Significantly, I had not properly researched my destination and lacked a firm idea of how to get to the town of Bagh. These things meant that I ended up relying heavily on local people to guide me to my destination. As it sometimes happens, I experienced a level of care and assistance that touched me, shaping my attitudes about travel, and subsequently the path I took with painting. For example, sometimes strangers literally took my arm and gently lead me to the next bus like a child, and seating me, with instructions to the driver. If you have ever 1

The economic situation of Kashmir has meant that much of its population survive on remittances sent by Kashmiris living outside or overseas.

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travelled without language or local knowledge through chaotic spaces such as those subcontinental bus stations at night, you may understand what it meant to receive such assistance. The journey made for seminal experiences that greatly influenced my perceptions of Pakistan, its people, and its culture from that time. I believe that such experiences paved the way for the development of my nomadic painting practice by offering me a taste of what it meant to operate with the methodology of trust. Serendipity in Practice The day that I applied for a Pakistanivisa in Delhi, I stood at the tail of a long line of relatives, aid workers, nurses, and journalists. I listened to their conversations that informed me about the vital nature of the work they would be doing, and began wondering what as an artist I thought I could contribute. I considered also my budget which I knew would not stretch to waiting out weeks in the city, and realised that if a visa was not granted very soon, that I would have to forgo ideas of travelling to Kashmir. When I reached the counter I found myself in a panic, and my voice was shaking. The clerk looked up from the form I had filled, his face incredulous. “You are a painter? You want to make pictures of Pakistan?” I found myself saying breathlessly, “Yes! I want to make paintings about Pakistan!” To my surprise this response seemed to please him immensely and he replied, “I will do my level best. Come back at four pm”. I did not understand then the extent to which mainstream media reports had often distressed Pakistani people in promulgating ideas of a nation rife with terrorists. As I travelled on I began to discover that people would do almost anything to discount this notion. Without being certain, perhaps the visa officer perceived in the idea of making paintings, which in Miniature painting referred to objects traditionally of beauty and reverence, an endeavour that could likely cast Pakistan in a positive light. Serendipity for me is the idea of wanting something to happen but sensing that achieving it requires a kind of intervention or miracle. When I heard my name called out and understood that I had received the last visa to be given for that month, I felt a sense of serendipity. A sack of rocks also seemed to fall from my back. Wings or wheels seemed to attach themselves to my feet and a surge of energy found me running back to the highway, where I hailed a rickshaw. At my hotel I lost all inhibitions and clasped the hand of the manager, imploring him to assist me to get to Kashmir. This man who until this point been surly and often rude responded with a personality flip. He actually leapt onto his motorcycle and ferried me at hair-raising speed through the heart of the city to the Kashmiri gate depot. Entering, we passed a bus leaving for Wagah border whereupon the manager drove his bike to its door, called to the driver, heaved my pack on board and settled me into a seat. Incredible timing, I remembered thinking, as I scrabbled in my pockets for the fare. There was something about that first journey to Pakistan and the events unfolding after that had the quality of a magic carpet ride. Perhaps it was the way that throughout I received what appeared to me to be an extraordinary level of help and guidance. Perhaps also I was discovering something about what it means to be a guest in a culture where the idea of the guest has spiritual significance and is taken extremely seriously. I was also learning that it meant a great deal to people that a foreigner, especially one

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who was female, felt strongly enough to come halfway across the world on her own in order to spend time with, get to know, and make art about them and their country. And, as mentioned, people were aware that in the foreign media Pakistan was represented as unsafe. In those days at the Indo-Pakistan border one could catch a local bus to Lahore. I boarded that bus and upon arriving asked for directions to find transport to Bagh. I was shown to a bus that travelled on for the next four hours to Islamabad or rather Rawalpindi which is the bus depot from which leaves all transport to the provinces. In Rawalpindi, confronted by a potential nightmare in terms of the confusing and congested depot, I was again guided by helpful people to a bus that took me to Bagh. Twentyfive hours later, at dusk the following day, I had arrived. In Bagh I was unprepared for the sight of the town, which at first sight appeared to be composed of mostly rubble. Tents stretched from each side of the road as, cramped from hours of sitting, I tottered down the street with my pack, seeking somewhere to stay. Daylight was fading but the only hotels I could see standing were crammed with people. They watched me as I walked past. At the foot of a flight of stairs across which hung a banner for the organisation ‘Islamic Relief’ I paused for breath and looked up. I saw a young man at the top of the stairs. He was actually waving to me, and calling, “Come up, come up!” The man was Akbar, a social worker with NGO, Islamic Relief. Panting from the climb, I introduced myself as coherently as I could. Akbar was amazed at the idea of a woman wanting to travel alone from a place as faraway and as blessed as Australia, to make pictures about people she didn’t know, and whose religion she did not follow. He promptly introduced me to his field manager and after some discussion I was offered to stay and work with the organization as a volunteer. I had explained that I was a painter, who wanted to make pictures about the earthquake, and it seemed that Ackbar and his manager saw in this a means by which to offer attention and listening spaces to people experiencing bereavement, displacement, and hardship. At this time there were only two councelors for the thousands of people stranded in camps, hence the idea to position me as an empathetic presence. But as well there were many local people who had been upset and angered by the way that foreign journalists and photographers in the aftermath of the quake had entered camps, taking candid pictures of people in states of grief and disarray. These activities had not only inflamed people, but had generated mistrust of foreigners, with the result that some communities were refusing to accept non-Pakistani aid workers into their camps. At that time I was unaware of protocols governing disaster zones that require foreigners working on the ground be accounted for and endorsed by either national and/or local organisations. Because I was Australian, Islamic Relief approached the official relief organisation AusAid with a request that they endorse my presence as a field volunteer. I was dismayed when the Australian field manager refused, stating that that an artist was of no use in this situation, and that my presence even constituted a liability. I felt a sense of hopelessness such as I had felt in Delhi at the Pakistan embassy. However Ackbar and his supervisor decided that Islamic Relief could use me, and thus endorsed me themselves. It was an incredible gift, as with

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their organisation I found myself facilitated to be with people as field worker, and as artist. In my spare time I was free to wander in the town. I found myself drawn to the tiny tea shops and dhabas, humble hole-in-the-wall places that were were full of people. These were places where traditionally mainly men gathered, however I found myself welcomed. I would be shown to a seat in a corner, where I could see the room yet sit undisturbed. I developed a habit of sitting in such corners and sketching portraits. At first I was left alone out of respect, but in time people approached, curious about what I was doing. The fact that I was drawing seemed to interest them, and when it was realised that I was drawing the patrons, they came to sit for me. In the process of being sketched, they would talk, or they would talk in Kashmiri and a friend would translate. Thus I experienced the way sketching opened a space for connection. Many of the men told me that they had lost family, wives, children, and friends on that day of the earthquake. I listened, I sketched out their stories in rapid, cartoon-like strips. Sometimes I sat as they grieved, with their friends arms around their backs. It was not easy to sit and listen to some of the stories shared with me. I remember a school teacher who broke down in sobs as he talked of how he had been unable to save his class, so quickly had the roof and walls fallen in. It seemed, as Akbar had said, that many people really needed to talk, be listened to, and heard. Knowing When to Leave I was not a seasoned aid worker nor had I been trained to deal with trauma. Spending time in close proximity with people in the aftermath of the earthquake was emotionally as well as physically exhausing. There were no councelling resources for staff at Islamic Relief or Kashmir Charity Trust and in this way my experience included discovering my personal limitations. Six weeks into my volunteering experience I didn’t want to leave and yet I knew that I was no longer functioning well physically and emotionally. I found it difficult to leave. Since that time I have realised that knowing when to take leave a situation is important in terms of effective field volunteering, and also in terms of effective storytelling. I was beginning to realise the significance of this way of working that mingled the work of the volunteer, the witness, and the artist, and what was asked for regarding resiliance, inner strength, and self-knowledge. On the Day of the Earthquake I have not talked about the impulse to go to Kashmir to volunteer myself, and to make pictures. This impulse came as I listened to news reports in the aftermath of the earthquake. In these Kashmiri people were being depicted in ways that, having spent time with people there, I found difficult to accept. The mainstream media had made the people out to be irrational, uncontrollable, and barbaric. Lacking an understanding of Kashmiri history, I wondered why. Such reports made me feel it was important to go there to see what was happening for myself. As I learned during my time with people in the camps, Kashmiris had been portrayed in these ways for political reasons, which were to do with the historic and ongoing situation of Kashmir as an occupied territory.

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People I talked to told me that in those precious hours directly after the earthquake the army actively prevented the movement of civilians. They did so for political reasons, anticipating for example that the Kashmir resistance movement might exploit the temporary collapse of authority. Their strategy had tragic consequences as many who might have survived died waiting for rescue operations. As one Kashmiri youth told me, “The army actively prevented us from going to the aid of our families. We could hear them crying and screaming for help, and we went mad.”2 Miniature Painting: Glossary of Terms and Techniques Alam al khyal: This relates to ideas of an intermediate reality between the archetypal and symbolic world and the physical reality, and is associated with the imaginary, and the inner experience of the archetypal world of forms. Burnishing: The technique of rubbing paintings with a smooth stone to compress layers of pigment. The action produces an smooth surface over which fine brushwork can be executed. It has the advantage of making the painting very stable and thus durable and long-lasting. Ebru: In Persian this means ‘cloud art’. It refers to marbling, a technique for creating patterns on paper. Gum Arabic: A natural binder used to make paint created by heating and purifying the sap of trees. Imaginal world: the mundis imaginalis, imaginary world, and another name for alam al khyal. Hamzanama: In Persian, “The Book of Hamza”, notable for its especially large illustrations commissioned by the boy Emperor Akbar. Pardakht: The stippling effect created to evoke volume in miniature paintings. Qalam: Traditional hand-made brush composed of a tuft of squirrel hair set into a feather quill. Safeda: A medium composed of ground lime used as a base for paints in combination with Gum Arabic, water, and pure pigment. Shell gold/silver/bronze: Metallic pigments that have been packed into small seashells. Siya qalam: Persian meaning ‘black line’—the line made using the qalam Shahnameh: In Persian the “Book of Kings”, an epic eleventh century poem by Abul Qasim Firdowsi (935–1020). Thangkha: Tibetan school of miniature painting devoted to depiction of religious subjects.

2

“Pakistan: The Role of the Military in the Pakistan Earthquake.”

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Wasli: Traditional hand-made paper used for miniature. Formed of at least several layers of thinner papers, these pasted together create a highly durable base for paintings. Recipes and Techniques Opaque Colour Miniature recipes use very small amounts of materials, often added by the scrape or the drop. For mixing, seashells were typically used. To create opaque colour, mix a very small amount of safeda with several drops of gum Arabic and equal drops of water, blending until smooth. Add a small quantity of watercolour pigment and mix. Continue adding pigment and blending until the desired hue is achieved. Opaque pigment is applied to paper in layers with a medium sized brush. When a layer is dry, the new layer is laid down in a different direction. When all are dry, these are burnished. Translucent Colour Translucent colour is often used in miniature and involves mixing dilute blends of water and watercolour pigment. In miniature translucent colour is used in a way similar to traditional English watercolour, including techniques such as bleed and wash. Watercolour techniques using translucence and bleeding effects as explored within this study were inspired by examples that can be found in paintings of the Shahnameh and Hamzanama manuscripts. Siya Qalam Siya qalam or black line is executed using dilutions of black/coloured watercolour. In Persian miniature the vocabulary of line is large. Flowing lines are used for example to represent air or water, as well as providing visual metaphors for the ‘ebb and flow’ of time. Such line-work borrows from Tibetan miniature or Thangkha painting, in which flowing lines are used to represent states of desire and confusion in the temporal realm. Line arranged in eddies or swirls entertains the eye and knits together areas of the picture space, and was a strategy much used by painters of the Persian era. Siya qalam requires a steady, light hand. Making the line involves loading the brush with the dilute solution of pigment and water, drying the brush off a little on the back of the hand or a piece of paper, before taking the brush across the paper to create a fine line that does not bleed. Perhaps the most important factor with making siya qualam is the smoothness of the paper and burnishing which creates the surface most conducive to creating the finest of lines. Pattern and Ornament The language of pattern and ornament, a significant feature of Persian miniatures, involves creating fields of floral or geometric forms. Patterns in miniature could be purely ornamental—a means of pleasuring the eye—or would function as subtext through the symbolic meanings associated with particular forms. Fields of pattern

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imbue particular and identifiable rhythms and would be used to decorate both the margins and the inner parts of picture spaces. Traditionally artists used templates to give their patterns symmetry and evenness. As with siya qalam, the smoothness of the paper assists intricate patternpainting. Patterns are created piecemeal over burnished opaque layers. Once dry, completed sections of pattern are burnished, and the process repeated until the pattern is complete. Pardakht Pardakht is a stippled effect created by many tiny brush marks using dilutions of watercolour. Layers of pardakh give illusions of volume or softness. Marbling or Ebru (Cloud Art) Marbling developed in Iran during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries where is was known as ebru which means “cloud art”. It became a feature of miniatures in border art and central picture spaces. Ebru is created by placing paint, either oil or ink onto either plain water or water thickened with starch or other agents. Swirling the paint creates patterns on which paper can be laid. The picking up of the pigment creates serendipitous and often extraordinary markings. In Persian miniature marbling was created on separate pieces of paper from which shapes could be cut and applied as collage.

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© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 M. Glikson, Peripatetic Painting: Pathways in Social, Immersive, and Empathic Art Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4005-6

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