An Attempt at the Autumnal Garden

An Attempt at the Autumnal Garden

Musings and meanderings concerning autumn.
Written in English.

Snapshot of a shrivelled rose along my path.

The spectacle of autumn is overwhelming in its urgency and intensity, pushing me to sculpt words around experiences - although I know how every attempt to render that deep, tearing honey-sweet pain of autumn into text will always feel insufficient.

For a while, I have felt mute; busy, perhaps too overwhelmed with all the bits and pieces of my everyday life to really manage deep-thinking-writing time. But now, with the beauty and brevity of these golden weeks so palpable, I feel I have no choice but to carve out a few hours to think on paper.

My work centres around in the inner Garden (which I think of in capital letters), embedded in humanity’s collective being, and around all the metaphors attached to this image, such as the idea of paradise. Autumn means death in the Garden. And it is a conscious, flamboyant kind of death.

Every year, I’m swept off my feet by the emotional force of it all, the luminosity of the colours, the shrivelling rose hips and un-picked blackberries, the darkening edges around leaves, the slow creeping of yellows into greens, and oranges into yellows, the evening cold, the sunset pinks, the slanted light, the confused crocus I discovered on a walk, the wild apples and walnuts crowding the riverbank.

 It’s harvesting time. Time to collect, time to roam the fields, to follow those small winding paths along the river to look, look, look at the world, observe nature with your entire being; time to absorb the colours and store them deep in your soul for later.

It is also a time for a strange kind of pain, a time for a conscious contemplation of death. Every exquisite yellow leaf is a slither of lived life, a slice of death; it will be decaying soon, magically broken down into its components by fungi, bacteria and other precious agents of change. But it will also be a leaf-shaped space for something new in this world, next year, in the next cycle. It will be transmuted, made into nutrients for other life forms. It is given freely.

 We humans are astonishing creatures. I believe that we have the unique ability to hold paradoxes in our mind, and this balance of seemingly irreconcilable opposites is exactly that place where our humanity flourishes. It’s that moment of inner freedom, where we are detached enough not to succumb to self-pity and emotional enough to feel real empathy, where we hold birth and death, joy and sorrow in one and the same space, with grace and dignity and (self-)love. This is my ambition for these upcoming weeks: practising to hold that difficulty within myself, being a witness, becoming really comfortable with paradoxes.

Here, in this moment of joyful pain, and melancholy gratitude, I think there is a grand lesson to be learned from nature. The search for a good life is closely tangled into the search for a good death. Death looming, invisibly and inevitably, is the most life-affirming impulse there is. It transmits the urgency of living in imperatives: Do! Make! Craft! Love! Fall! Build! Dream! Cry! Bleed! Share! And if I may, when my time comes, face my own death with the graceful surrender of the Autumnal Garden, it would be a good death.

Below are the manifestations of my wanderings and wonderings in the fields and forests around my (still-new) hometown of Bamberg, observing the close-knit fabric of nature, watching the wildflower calendar carousel through the seasons, and the yellowing of the forest, the migration of birds. By collecting, composing and creating, I attempt to channel my emotions into this visual Garden.

Above:

SPATTER: DEEP FOREST, available here. Enamelled statement earrings housed in a watercolour painting. With my overgrown forest landscapes I'm creating a dense, imaginary jungle of shapes and colours and symbols that draw the viewer into its thicket. It's all about the complex garden we carry within ourselves, the ambivalence of our souls - cultivated and wild, dangerous and gentle, a space that is hazardous and safe at times, both present in the now and eternal, both human and divine.

Detail of SPATTER: DEEP FOREST; see the entire art work above.

UNDERGROWTH, an impression of a walk by the river. Watercolour, ink & beeswax painting - available here.

This is harvesting time. Finding patterns, colours.

Still clinging, surrounded by siblings.

BOTANIST’S HALF-DREAM JUST BEFORE DAWN, available here in my online-shop or at the studio in Bamberg.

Statement neckpiece. Carefully kiln-enamelled disks, concave side in a variety of mottled dreamy greens and autumn colours and convex side a deep burgundy red.

Autumn will forever stay the most inspirational season to me. The colours flood me, dominate my mood. I feel as if I'm walking on mottled gold, eating slices of autumn, breathing wild-grapevine-purples and falling asleep into a sea of oranges at night. Colour buoys me up, and seeps out of me into my work.

GREEN LEAFEATERS. Bright statement earrings.

My LeafEater series is inspired by the intricate patterns on leaves left ravaged by hungry insects. As I paid closer attention, I noticed how different plants attract different predators, and how they each have their unique patterns. Like most humans, leaves are comparable, but never ever actually the same. In an attempt to get to know one leaf intimately, I play with these patterns, subtle colours, jagged edges, and lace-like cutouts. Each leaf is hand-sawn and kiln-enamelled.

Above:

SAFFRON POMEGRANATE, available here. Pendant showing off the marvels of enamelling as a contemporary jewellery technique.

These abstracted pomegranates are vibrant fruit stolen from an imagined paradise, a garden of dream-like spaces and lost mythological treasures. Wear them to carry a small token of Persephone, the goddess of springtime, vibrant botanicals and the dark underworld.

HEDERA, statement earrings. Enamel on silver, silver hook, faceted pink garnet drops.

A CONSCIOUS GARDEN, being assembled on my jewellery bench.

Dog roses, mummified memories of last summer.

Newcomer

Newcomer

Bamberg: I’m new in town. So the natural thing for me to do is to explore, to go on long winding walks, criss-crossing the streets until I can assemble a map in my mind.

Written in English.

I’m new in town. So the natural thing for me to do is to explore, to go on long winding walks, criss-crossing the streets until I can assemble a map in my mind. Walks as long as my time and the limited daylight hours and our current lockdown curfew will permit.

 To live in a time with a government-imposed curfew! I never imagined it, it seems so bizarre. A curfew used to remind me of Second-World-War-stories, with grandmothers telling tales about blacking out windows with towels around the edges at night, stories of enemies out there, scared glances, and stealthy lovers sneaking home at night, carefully avoiding open stretches between houses. Now, we’re scared of a different enemy out there, an invisible one, all the more stealthy because we expect it in our neighbour’s friendly embrace, in our sister’s greeting and our business partner’s handshake.

 I have lost myself in the narrow winding alleyways of one of Bamberg’s seven hills again, alleyways that provide barely enough space for a small waste bin, a parked (unlocked) bicycle and one human being passing by. The cobblestones are sloped towards the middle, catching puddles of ice-crusted water from yesterday’s now melting snow.

An imaginary parade of Bamberg’s oldest inhabitants, tilted in mutual support. In my mind, those remembered images of real houses from my meandering walks are fused together into imagined compositions, half fact, half fiction.

The city has a multitude of faces, that much I’ve seen already. As the winter landscape is drained of colour, and the last dregs of sunlight subside, my eyes become more attuned to these soft winter hues, micro-nuances of colour, much gentler than the glaring summer light. The eye learns to pick out and compare the most subtle differences. These are colours much too elusive, their only names might be obscure numbers on some highly technical colour chart. But how much more romantic to call the colour of the sky “swan blush” than “pantone 434M”.

 These narrow streets are not as crowded as the main city centre: broad streets lined with stucco-covered historical buildings and shops. Although, even those are almost deserted now in comparison to the usual tourist bustle. There is something forlorn about these shop windows now, large posters with “SALE!!” written across them in bold red letters, “SALE 50% OFF” and “EVERYTHING NEEDS TO GO”. Some shopfronts are already empty like dark holes in the lit consumerist parade, rotten teeth. Some are dismantled, LED-signs hanging from a single wire, cardboard boxes stacked inside. Soon, the empty slot will be inhabited by another chain store.

 Although, maybe not, who knows, since Bamberg’s citizens are heroically patriotic, supporting their local community businesses in ever more ingenious ways despite the national Corona restrictions. It’s a joy to watch.

 To me, Bamberg features all those gloriously magical details I spent the siesta hours of my childhood discovering in gothic fairy tale books and glossy (and heavy) compilations of Romantic landscape paintings. It’s all here: The crumbling medieval houses – although the city centre is pristinely preserved and has certainly earned it’s UNESCO World Heritage status – so you have to search for those at the fringes; the moss-covered walls and stained roof tiles; the angular corners of houses unplanned and organically grown like bursts of mushrooms; the gilded church spires and patinated copper domes; the secret alleys and shortcuts; the river with its small surface twirls indicating treacherous currents underneath; the swans and waterfowl; the ancient oaks in the park that have survived wars and pandemics alike, and seem to be watching us with serious faces, branches weighed down with lichens and moss, in truth not single trees but a multitude of beings, inseparable now, tethered to their mutual network of lived history.

 And the Altenburg Castle, perched on its hill above the town. Although it is neither as old nor as crumbly as some other castles in the area, it is undeniably very castle-like and quite beautiful, especially now, lit in an orange halo in the blue snow dusk. There is the forest all around, silent and loud at the same time with trees whispering, watching. There are golden sandstone walls and buildings and statues and carvings in an astounding luminous ochre the colour of golden local beer (which is plentiful), honeyed stones revealing their true splendour in the slanted sunlight.

 There are so many stories layered here, dark-edged stories, stories that seep out of the mossy stones and pool black and menacingly around your feet as you pause. And there is lightness too, stories of relentless building and rebuilding, of crowning things, of preserving things, of weathering out storms and chiselling sacred knowledge into maps for future generations to rediscover.

 There are cries trapped in the rough stone, burnt witches’ cries and zealous believers’ cries and shouted salutes to the Führer, cries of pain and joy, panic at the sight of the next shattering ice flood thundering down the river and tearing away bridges and houses in its path, peasant uprisings, foreign conquests, ancient ideologies. And as the brittle stones erode in our current-day tornado, I can almost watch those trapped cries escape like frozen particles in Antarctic ice melting. All those criers, I remind myself, they were all brought into this world by a mother, hopefully they were loved, and loved others in turn, they ached for safety and beauty and hoped to care for those closest to them, they grieved, they trusted in something, and they all crafted away at their intimate little dreams.

 To be part of a multitude like this, and stand alone at the same time, feels infinitely powerful. I am quite excited to roam these streets until every corner is familiar, and then to watch the familiar change with the seasons, and then some more.

Altenburg Castle cushioned on its snow-topped hill above the city.

Watercolour and ink illustrations by Nora Kovats.