When Floral
Offerings, Leafprints, and Color Field Paintings Register not only Nature’s
Rhythm but the Creative Process’ Growth Pains
AM+DG / Jason Dy, SJ, 23 June 2019
Fallen bouganvel (bougainvillea)
in varying petal discolorations of crepey reddish-pink were collected at the front courtyard of Mitraniketan, Wagamon during the first day of the Wagamon
Art Workshop (WAW). They were arranged in a radial circular pattern with tonal
values of fresh and decomposing bouganvel.
This untitled site-specific floral installation (2019) was
an offering of the Jesuit priest and Filipino artist Jason Dy, SJ. It was Dy’s performative
homage to the place founded by the Malayalam doctor Elizabeth Jacob-Baker
together with her British-born architect-husband Laurie Baker. In Sanskrit, Mitraniketan
is a compound word for mitra,
meaning, friends, and niketan, home.
Responding to the social and medical needs of the communities living in Vagamon
mountains of Kottayam District, Kerala, the Bakers together with Mitraniketan
Social Service Society provided a sincere space of red bricks and wood to care
for the people in the district especially the women and children. In his stay,
Dy also found the homeliness of the space as well as the hospitality of the
staff and participants of WAW. The floral offering was not only a sensitive
referral to the Malayalam religious and cultural ritual known as ‘Kondrai’ or ‘Kannikona’ but also a response to nature’s cyclic rhythm of birth,
decay, and rebirth.
This rhythm was also manifested in the creative process of
the participating artists who were mainly clerics and religious from various
Christian traditions found art not just for aesthetic pleasure but a vocation to integrate the path of beauty in their spirituality and varied
ministries. Dy had found a kindred spirit with the participants.
Dy initially gravitated towards his on-going art project on
nature and spirituality entitled “Listening to the Leaves.” He created the
painting entitled “Nava Dwara” (2019)
with nine leaf prints arranged in a radial circular pattern symbolic of the
notion of the body with nine portals in the Sanskrit scripture Bhagavad Gita
(BG). This Hindu text suggests that “the embodied soul lives in the city of
nine gates” (BG 5.13). Here, when the body’s embeddedness on its own materiality
would be consciously transcended, the person “happily lives within the city of
nine gates” (BG 5.13). From the Christian perspective, Dy had interpreted this
text as the corporeality of human being that needs to be integrated with the
Spirit for the wholeness of one’s person. In the almost graphic composition of
the painting, Dy framed the leaf prints with two contrasting color fields, one,
was the gradation of dark to brown fecal matter seemingly dripping from the top
of the canvas, and the other, was the hues of soft sun atop a green lush
mountain rising on the light blue horizon enveloped by the morning mist. These
two opposing landscapes of a sewer and a sunrise floating on a sea of whiteness
may be pointing to the existential human struggle of evil, suffering, and
redemption.
In his further study of the landscape of India, Dy painted a square canvas with a background consisting of gradations of grays. In the middle, he foregrounded a thin strip of graded warm colors of fiery red, ripening yellow, and white tint. He entitled it “Saffron on an Ash Gray Skies” (2019). Saffron, also known as Bhagwa, the most important color in Hinduism denotes the virtues of renunciation, disinterestedness, and enlightenment. These virtues are essential when one threads the path of integration in this conflicted world. These are also important attitudes in engaging with the created universe.
A complimentary painting is “Water Falling on a Rock” (2019). Also in the tradition of
minimalist non-objective painting, the Zen-inspired title and aesthetics of the
work connect to the origins of Buddhism in the Eastern part of ancient India
(now in Bihar, India). In 2007, during his first trip to India as part of the
Jesuit Art Workshop (JAW) organized also by Rappai Poothokaren, SJ at Tarumitra,
Patna, Dy visited Bodh Gaya, the pilgrimage site for Buddhists as the holy
place where Siddhārtha Gautama was enlightened. As the work suggests the power
of soft elements carving holes into hard materials, the painting is a homage to
the Creator whose spirit transforms all of creation in a gradual yet laborious way.
To labor for the welfare of our common home—the earth, is also the invitation
to all human beings as stewards of God’s creation.
Though initially working in the traditional media of
painting and leaf printing, during the course of the workshop, Dy had
repurposed the discarded cotton waste soiled with acrylic paints into
textile-based works. He stitched the cotton threads onto the canvas using needles.
Stitching became an act of drawing lines on the paper resembling the threads
and cotton waste into images of bridges, kites, dolphins, heart, spears, rose,
and coconut fronds.
In exhibiting these textile-based works on a hospital push
tray along with the needle, cotton waste, and red scissors, Dy interacted with
the maternity room with a metal cabinet and two birthing tables designed by
Laurie Baker. Like the surgical scissors used properly by the hands of doctors
like Dr. Jacob-Baker, the needles, threads, and cotton waste were transformed
by the creative imagination and skillful hands of artists like Dy.
And on the last of the workshop, Dy photographed all the surgical
equipment, medical supplies, and medical logbooks inside the metal cabinets. This
was primarily his homage to the Bakers. For him, these objects are artifacts of
surgical, maternal, and medical procedures that happened in the room. They
register the painful incisions that are necessary for the birth of newborns to
happen. Like in maternity clinics, growth pains also happen in the artist’s
studios or an art residency like in WAW for art to thrive, artists to survive
in nature and/or a new environment. Indeed, this growth pain happened to Dy
during his art residency.
