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.

The Power of Selective Storytelling: Avoiding the Dark

An evening view at “the lower dam” in late August.

Grandfather, being all grandfatherly. Slanted evening sunlight.

After the winter rains, the dams are (hopefully) all filled to the brim. My garndparents’ dog, Titania, splashing through waterblommetjies.

The worst was the smell, and the unidentifiable, chunky slime.

 I have this profound childhood memory of walking with my grandfather on the farm, when we found an ewe lying on the ground, on one of those broad granite boulders surfacing from the grass. It was almost evening. She was groaning and struggling, clearly in labour and in considerable pain. My grandfather knelt down to examine her and I tried to calm the poor animal by holding her head and covering her eyes. I must have been about ten years old, maybe a bit younger.

We found that she was battling to give birth to twins, both of them dead. The first one, gently freed by my grandfather, had cream-coloured short wool and was covered in a thin, bloody film, and it looked like it was asleep. I remember that face, scrunched up but perfect in its smallness. The second lamb had been dead for longer, it was half decayed already and came apart in my grandfather’s hands. The smell was horrible. I remember thinking that the least I could do to honour this creature’s suffering, was to endure the nauseating smell unflinchingly. I remember how black the blood looked, lumpy bits of bloody tissue and pale limbs wrapped in slime. And I remember feeling a great sadness for something that could never be, never become.

That must have been the first significant encounter with the gruesomeness of death in my life, although I had seen dead and dying animals before – pets that had died or been run over by cars, and slaughtered animals of course – and the concept of death, animal and human, had always been part of my world in stories, as far as I can think back. But this was different. I was filled with a kind of awe at the power of life and death and their cycles. I intuitively understood, perhaps at that very moment, that life will give and take, that resistance is a waste of energy, and that one way of finding contentment is to surrender to this power and willingly accept its gifts and bear its losses with a kind of earnest grace. I have been able to deal with loss in my life so far, experiencing a type of unhurried grief while knowing that it must be part of the human experience.

The stories I have been telling about the farm I grew up on, specifically in light of our upcoming exhibition there, are stories of springtime and wildflowers, of imaginative childhood games, running barefoot, more summer fruit than anyone could ever stomach, stories of grape harvests and eating watermelon and horse-riding and achingly beautiful landscapes. “What an idyllic childhood you must have had!” people say to me, sometimes with an accusing undertone in their voices.

Jim, a bit of a whirlwind at times.

But it isn’t the only truth. Sometimes I tend to display the brightest of memories like polished pebbles in a row. We are all sentimental beings. Perhaps it’s true that I am guilty of hiding dark moments in dark imaginary closets. I have been thinking about this lately, and I am most certainly guilty of selective storytelling, illuminating the positive aspects of a narrative to gather strength and positive energy. And perhaps I’m guilty of accidentally ignoring darker aspects in an attempt to stay optimistic and joyful. Maybe there are emotions I am not yet able to articulate, but I think I should try. It’s also true that I often don’t judge experiences as “good” or “bad” immediately; I simply try to live them, which isn’t an easy notion to convey in a world that constantly judges and pressures to be better and shinier every day.

 I want to try and be more mindful of all kinds of events and viewpoints in my storytelling. Stories are nothing but fragments, chained together by time, often in archetypal patterns that move us precisely because they are timeless and universal. In my mind, there is no such thing as “the whole story” or “the only correct version” of a story, but I want to be more articulate, delve deeper and explore darker fragments and memories that may be painful to write and read about, alongside the bright stories that buoy us up.

 My childhood wasn’t idyllic. It wasn’t bad either. It was my reality. It was rich and filled with creativity and inquisitiveness and meaning. I was fascinated with all kinds of bizarre experiences. There were nasty thorns on that farm, and our feet had to be de-thorned with a needle on an almost bi-weekly basis by my patient mother. That never stopped us from running around barefoot. That feeling of lightness and freedom outweighed the short stab of pain caused by a thorn. Besides, our feet grew callous and immune to thorns eventually.

Woven into that story of a childhood on a wine farm near Cape Town are complex stories of my heritage. Stories of wars and hiding in bomb shelters and life in WWII Germany that were never really talked about in our family. Stories of growing up in Soviet Hungary, yearning for personal freedom, stories littered with rejection and judgement and regret and pain and helplessness. Stories of experiencing reality on the easy side of Apartheid. And in between, chicken running across a yard strewn with purple Jacaranda blossoms, and us hunting guinea fowl as they flock home to their sleeping trees by the hundreds, pretending to be Indian warriors, and climbing trees to the very top. It’s really a thick, complicated narrative with thousands of threads, our grandparents’ fears suddenly bearing their teeth and ancient societal norms resurfacing from god knows where. I hope to delve into this narrative in a more articulate way as I get older and more capable of untangling and reframing these images with my personal lens. I hope to show the darkness and the callousness and the scars interlaced with new life and light and relentless love. And above all, I wish to show that each individual carries a meaningful web of stories inside, like a glowing gem.

More waterblommetjies, a whole pond. These are edible and make a delicious traditional Cape lamb stew ingredient.

Walking down to a grassy part at the lower end of the farm.