Sculpture Symposium - Under the Tree Kerala, India, Changampuzha Park 2002 Photos: Paul Litherland, Karen Trask 1 2 3 4 detail words 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 engraver installation shot Under the Tree I had no clear idea what I would be making for the symposium in Changampuzha Park until several days after my arrival in Edapally. I only knew that I wanted to continue working with my ideas linking the written language and trees* and that I wanted to make an outdoor poetry installation using one of my poems, Poésie de passage. The organizing committee introduced me to Uma Sankaran, a French teacher in a local highschool. She agreed to take on the task of translating the poem into Malayalam. When Paul and I arrived in Edapally, the symposium had been underway for several days and much of the space was already busy with sculpture making. I chose a quiet more secluded site at the back of the park. Here the trunks of three small trees entwined around each other, their branches reaching up into a thick canopy of leaves that spread a welcome umbrella of shade over the most inviting stone bench below. It seemed to be a favourite meeting place, an intimate oasis – one seldom without visitors. I decided to make a three-part work that would be installed together in this location. I wanted these three works to represent passages of time, from the ephemeral, to the enduring and the perennial ebbs and flows holding up the middle territory between these two extremes. Correspondingly, I wanted something that represented my very temporary passage in Edapally, something that represented me and my work here in this symposium. I also wanted something that was of the people and the place, something that would continue regardless of me. For the ephemeral part, I took my poem now translated into Malayalam and daily copied and carved the letters of this delightfully arabesque alphabet into the sheets of styrofoam that would serve as the matrix for casting the words of the poem in paper (cotton pulp.) I had to constantly enlist the help of passers-by to decipher Umaÿs handwritten text into the corresponding letters which were then to be strung together into the words of the poem. It took my entire time there to prepare only a part of the poem. I selected important sections that could stand alone and on the last weekend, I hung them in the trees using the branches like lines on a sheet of paper to give structure to the work. The sun and the wind played with the suspended lines of poem adding their own textures and poetry to the work. The only way that this part of the work would live a longer life is if the visitors to the park would steal the words and take them home and of course in the visual documentation that was taken of the work. For the more enduring part of this three-part piece, I chose to work with a citation from Ramanon, the widely read and well-loved novel by Krishna Pilla Changampuzha of Kerala and after whom the park was named. I asked the organization to hire a local stone engraver to come and carve the text into the seat of the stone bench. Choosing something appropriate was difficult as I found the english translation of Ramanon often quite clumsy. This is the translation of the passage, so you can judge for yourself. Life is a riddle most complicated since ever Yet none has answered it ever precisely clear. The organizers did not understand why I did not want an upright monument in stone for the text. My response was that I wanted people to sit on the words; I wanted it to be a physical relationship and not a more distancing visual one. I wanted this text to penetrate the body; I wanted people to touch and to feel the words physically. The third part of this work evolved as a huge open book carved from a section of a trunk of Malasian rosewood. The natural colour of this wood is so intense and very seductive. I wanted it to be a female book – red and vulva-like. I used Bon Juÿs (one of the Korean artists) chainsaw to carve the book form out of the wood. I carved out a simple form, that left as much of the original tree trunk as present as possible. I then inscribed the Malayalam letter ÎAÿ onto the left side of the book and a bronze casting of a leaf was attached to the centre-fold. The entire structure was raised slightly above the ground onto three metal posts and placed under the trees. The Malayalam alphabet was a great source of inspiration. A recent exhibition of my bookworks entitled Touch Wood, is a playful look at historical elements that link the book to the tree as the etymological root and physical source of the book. Both English and French are filled with vestiges of the tree's connection to the book. (for example: leaf as in pages, to leaf through a book and library from the Latin word liber meaning inner bark of the tree.) The curling, tendril-like shapes of the letters in Malayalam made me wonder if our first words and letters did not grow like buds and leaves in a tree to eventually evolve into contemporary letters of the alphabet. Someone gave me a copy of this lovely poem which sums up these thought so well. Vruksham (Tree) In yore I was a tree On the banks of a river The name of which I forget The river perhaps may remember Her by name Nile, Yamuna or Euphrates By jerks and jumps they wrote On earth the human rhythm Which I I read and remember my Being born in a wet whirlpool womb By Vayalar (translator unknown)