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Beneath the apparently dead surface of the sand, the pulse of
life continues unabated. All is there in potential. And it's a
refreshing alternative to the man-dominated environment. Elwes
has wandered through the dry tablelands of New Mexico observing
the Hopi Indians, he has visited the Chalbi desert and the Great
Rift Valley in East Africa, which was probably the first landscape
to register on human eyes. In his desire to see the world and
our relationship with it afresh, Elwes is drawn ineluctably to
first things and to last things - to the elemental.
What luck then to be invited at the
end of 1996 to join an expedition to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar
on the high Tibetan plateau. This is one of the world's most sacred
places, and, like Delphi, is thought to be the centre of the world,
its omphalos, or navel. Mount Kailash is identified in Hindu and
Buddhist cosmology as the World Pillar and the Pathway to the
Stars. The mountain is also identified as the abode of Shiva,
from whose hair the life-giving waters of the Ganges descend to
earth. Meanwhile Lake Manasarovar, known to the Buddhists as the
"green-gemmed mandala", is believed to have sprung from
the mind of the Brahma. A sacred site, inaccessible and isolated,
but the focus of concerted pilgrimage; such is the potency of
the place that to walk a single circuit of the mountain is said
to be sufficient to erase the sins of a lifetime.
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The circular route is a month's pilgrimage. Elwes speaks of the
redemptive powers of the magic mountain. It is a 50 kilometre
walk around the base (only Buddha ever went up the mountain itself),
and not everyone who undertakes it can complete the course. Material
offerings, or ex votos, are scattered over the foothills and blown
about, making it look a little like a rubbish dump. (The profane
has its place in the scheme of things.) The way is strewn with
carved and inscribed stones to mark the passage of previous pilgrims.
To Elwes, sensitive as he is to the genius loci or spirit of place,
it was like being on the roof of the world, with the sky close
enough to touch.
Elwes took the unusual experience
of the pilgrimage as a spur to his previous ideas, as a way of deepening
his own enquiry. The mountain itself doesn't feature in this series
of new pictures. True there's a small study of an idealised mountain
shape, but aside from that, it is an unseen though pervasive presence.
The holy river valley is on the other hand a favourite motif. The
river's source is at the base of Mount Kailash, and its flood forms
a beautiful turquoise thread of water down the valley. Elwes, for
the sake of pictorial and spiritual simplicity, in Fall, reduces
the river to a ribbon of blue, intermittent on the canvas. |
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