Seven years

I made my first ceramic sculpture in India, seven years ago. I was at an artist residency in the middle of the jungle of Baroda, working with a group of artist friends. There were cobras who shed their skin in front of our houses before dawn, monkeys who stole our bras, and peacocks who sang their lonely songs from the dark foliage at night.

I remember the studio buildings as stunningly beautiful, giant palaces of red bricks, and I was working in the printmaking studio, which was on top of a hill overlooking the jungle and which you could reach by climbing up a long and steep stairway that seemed endless under the white sun of the tropics.
On the foot of that hill was the ceramics studio, where Deveshi Sahgal, an artist whom I met there and who has become a great friend since, was working on huge sculpture, alone.

I don’t remember much about what clay I used or which glaze or what tools. I have no idea what I did, and that's probably because I had no idea what I did.
I remember Iria Do Castelo, another artist who came down with us to the ceramics studio, creating a precious head at an incredible pace, and told me that later she would cut it off and empty it, both of which amazed me, her working pace and the cutting off.
I, working much much slower, was amazed how my artwork, which was all line and flatness, translated into the third dimension. I have never been able to draw hands, but I learned that I could sculpt them. Also, I was surprised by the realism the third dimension brought to my artwork.

For whatever reason, one of the sculptures I made was a pregnant woman, and someone bought it at our exhibition we later held in New Delhi. Someone with a pregnant friend, I think. The one you see my working on the photo is called “horny woman”, she took me ages to make, and I still have her.
During the following years, traveling around the world, I worked in many printmaking studios, but I did not get in touch which clay again. It just was nowhere to be seen. But it stayed in my head. Not at the forefront, but somewhere in a dark spot in the back of my head.

The seed was sown, and it took seven years to grow.

During these years, I was a person with wings, I flew around a lot, carrying nothing but a sketchbook, and occasionally, some aluminum plates. Light stuff. I ask myself why I only started ceramics last year, and I imagine that maybe, working with ceramics requires some kind of roots. It is heavy, earthy, inert, it needs a lot of space. It needs roots, something which took me a long time to grow.

And so it happened that I started to work in ceramics after I spent a lot of time in my home country in the Austrian Alps. While the pandemic has stirred up the world, it brought a lot of calm to my life. Things have slowed down. I don’t travel as much. If I’ve been a hunter, now I’m more like a fisher. The pond does not move, but it becomes wider and deeper. One year ago, I started to work with clay, this summer I started to work with porcelain.

Ceramics, surprisingly, has a lot in common with printmaking. The suspense, the element of chance, the sense of serendipity. It can be immensely frustrating and it is incredibly satisfying. It can be the best, and it can be the worst (it is a lot like life itself). Another thing printmaking and ceramics have in common is that in these fields, you never stop learning. It is like a cosmos, a cosmos that is vital, fertile, and infinite, you can never fully explore it, and this is the beauty of it. You can walk around it forever and still encounter things that make you wonder, and make your hands feel brand new. I have just begun to walk around in it, and it makes me think of a poem I once wrote on a later stay in India:

Half of the world

When I die
I want to be able to say:
I explored half of this beautiful world
and left the other half
to my beautiful imagination

Photo: A&Y

If you want to see more of this creative India episode, here you can find SAVARI, my sketchbook from that journey

Travel sketchbooks: Capturing ephemeral countries

This is a portrait of my fellow artist Barbora. I met her in the North East of India, and for one month we shared a room in the jungle-covered hills of Meghalaya, where explored the fascinating culture of the Khasi together and became friends.

When I met her, I was immediately intrigued by her enthusiasm – she had just arrived from a long and complicated journey from Finland but instead of being exhausted, she seemed to burst with energy. Her eyes were beaming as she told us that she had, god knows how, managed to ride on an elephant on the way from Guwahati airport up to the hill, five hours on a bumpy dirt road, which was exhausting enough alone. 

I admired her way of seeing the world, her refreshing personality, which was a charming combination of straightforwardness and tenderness, and I was particularly fascinated by the instant and special connection she had with the Khasi, and I documented a part of her very special story in my book "Meghalaya".

I like to explore countries, cultures, and communities with my sketchbooks, but as much as they are travel books, they are also personal diaries. As much as I am interested in learning a lot about a culture and trying to tell stories about it, for me it is equally important to tell about the context in which I travel and tell about the things that happen in and around me: I am interested uniqueness of the moment. Sometimes I like to compare myself to a sponge, absorbing it all, and I also like to let myself carry away into all sorts of different directions - for example, my Meghalaya book is full of stories not only about Meghalaya, but also contains lots of stories about Assam, because that particular Meghalayan microcosmos I visited was inhabited by an Assamese storyteller whose beautiful stories for me became an important part of the experience. I like that sort of eclecticism because this is just how the world is, chaotic and marvelous. 

My travel sketchbook is not only about observations, but also about relationships, and a fellow traveler at some point becomes as much part of the place as a native – places express themselves through the people who live there, but also through the ones who travel through, and the story that develops between them, like the story of Barbora and Arrowstar, a young archer and soldier from the Khasi hills. 

I hold the pen in my hands, but what speaks in my sketchbooks is not only my voice, but the voice of many. I like it to be a place where everything can be object and everything can be subject. On the same page, you might read things I hear and other things I think in my head, and you might not even be able to tell whose story I’m telling. The story I’m telling is not linear, it’s associative, it’s fragmental, and whatever information is missing is filled out effortlessly by your fantasy: The drawing of Barbora reaching up to the blossoms of a tree and telling me “my heart is too big” only hints the love story that unfolds on a subsequent page. We don’t need to know everything, because sometimes, and especially when it comes to traveling, imagination is more delicious than knowledge. 

Imagine you’re wandering through an exotic market and there this mix of noises and images, you pick up snatches of conversations here and there and you smell things and you see things and there are so many impressions that they start to become blurred: This is the sensation I like to convey, not just this is this and that is that, but something of a more multidimensional, intangible nature, a bit like the way our perception and memory works. 

I am not an observer, I am what happens at a certain place at a certain moment, and it is precisely this experience that I like to capture – or to approach, because it is impossible to capture. And what we call “country” or “city” is a construct that only exists at that moment you step into it – while you believe you exist in it, it exists in you, and only exists in you. It is an experience, it is completely fluid, it is but it is many countries and many cities overlapping, you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends: A place, a country, a city is something that is made of moments, it is ephemeral, and in my sketchbook, I want to convey that taste of this ephemeral, precious place that only exists for a moment, with its voices, faces, stories, patterns. This place that only exists once and then never again. 

This book is the home of a country called Meghalaya that only exists between the pages of the book, the Meghalaya of Barbora and the Assamese storyteller and many others, humans, and spirits, who for a short while, or for an eternity, live between the magic mountains and enchanted forests of Meghalaya: This is a country that ends with the last page. And starts to live again somewhere else, as something else. 

My book Meghalaya is available here.
And this is Barbora.