Vaishali Prazmari
ABOUT VAISHALI PRAZMARI
EAST AND WEST & ANCIENT AND MODERN
Geography - Space
As a child I used to think all islands floated, bobbing along in the sea and remaining in more or less the same place because they wanted to - the childlike worldview can only be self-centred. Older, I understood that all islands are mountaintops connected deeply within the old earth, standing firm in the sea with only their peaks visibly hinting at hidden depths beneath. Later even this illusion was shattered; zooming out further these lands are fragments of the slow-moving earth crust, itself floating over unstable molten lava, and finally, further still, we are a tiny planet floating in deep space. A story within a story within a story, like the Arabian Nights. The constant shattering of illusions to finally surrendering to the comforting mystery of never being able to know everything. My childhood in Hong Kong was a mixture of Blade Runner east and west, night and day, ancient and modern and growing up island-hopping formed an early blueprint metaphor for my life.
History - Biography
Having Chinese, Indian with Persian ancestry and living in London is like having a gold mine, a diamond mine and a silver mine within a cave of wonders from which to pick and choose the various elements which make up a piece. It extends beyond paint and the painting's frame to create dialogues with other harmonious materials. This cultural richness has a historical tradition dating back to the Silk Road and it is epitomized in Islamic miniature paintings, which embody a fineness of line from China and vibrancy of colours and pigments from India and Central Asia to be synthesized into beautiful miniatures in the royal courts of Safavid Persia and the Moghul Empire, which in turn influenced and was influenced by the equal magnificence of Renaissance Europe. No art is made in isolation yet all artworks are islands that stand alone within their own archipelagoes. I see myself as a part of a continuum in this tradition of incorporating elements in a contemporary way from various cultures by which I am inspired on my own travels as well as the privilege of living in London, a city where if one is tired then they are tired of life (I am not tired!).
Synthesis - Time
All men are islands, thus are unique yet connected primordially, and building bridges between them does not threaten their inherent traditions. Tradition can coexist peacefully alongside modernity and I feel it is something worth repeating today; it also serves as the grit in the oyster shell that produces my work. Taking the master tea blender as a model I carefully select different yet naturally sympathetic elements to create new blends. The slow application of paint in layers can be likened to the constant blending of cultures over time where these elements become crystallized and localized. Truth settles into fiction the way that myths become consolidated into a culture over centuries and the earth erodes and builds up map contour lines over millenia. Unique content is created via a process of layering and crystallization. What was once contemporary becomes traditional. All that is solid melts into air. How many years does this take? I find the best vehicle for this transmission is paint, which naturally lends itself to blending separate colours to create unusual fabulous new ones. The apparent simplicity of painting disguises the breathtaking alchemy of creating something rich and strange from the humblest of materials. Paint is coloured mud. The process of blending is a form of meditation. A pleasureable, repetitive and relaxing activity. I believe art should be a mix of the sensuous and intellectual, a harmonious blend of both intelligences that speaks to both the head and the heart.
EAST AND WEST & ANCIENT AND MODERN
Geography - Space
As a child I used to think all islands floated, bobbing along in the sea and remaining in more or less the same place because they wanted to - the childlike worldview can only be self-centred. Older, I understood that all islands are mountaintops connected deeply within the old earth, standing firm in the sea with only their peaks visibly hinting at hidden depths beneath. Later even this illusion was shattered; zooming out further these lands are fragments of the slow-moving earth crust, itself floating over unstable molten lava, and finally, further still, we are a tiny planet floating in deep space. A story within a story within a story, like the Arabian Nights. The constant shattering of illusions to finally surrendering to the comforting mystery of never being able to know everything. My childhood in Hong Kong was a mixture of Blade Runner east and west, night and day, ancient and modern and growing up island-hopping formed an early blueprint metaphor for my life.
History - Biography
Having Chinese, Indian with Persian ancestry and living in London is like having a gold mine, a diamond mine and a silver mine within a cave of wonders from which to pick and choose the various elements which make up a piece. It extends beyond paint and the painting's frame to create dialogues with other harmonious materials. This cultural richness has a historical tradition dating back to the Silk Road and it is epitomized in Islamic miniature paintings, which embody a fineness of line from China and vibrancy of colours and pigments from India and Central Asia to be synthesized into beautiful miniatures in the royal courts of Safavid Persia and the Moghul Empire, which in turn influenced and was influenced by the equal magnificence of Renaissance Europe. No art is made in isolation yet all artworks are islands that stand alone within their own archipelagoes. I see myself as a part of a continuum in this tradition of incorporating elements in a contemporary way from various cultures by which I am inspired on my own travels as well as the privilege of living in London, a city where if one is tired then they are tired of life (I am not tired!).
Synthesis - Time
All men are islands, thus are unique yet connected primordially, and building bridges between them does not threaten their inherent traditions. Tradition can coexist peacefully alongside modernity and I feel it is something worth repeating today; it also serves as the grit in the oyster shell that produces my work. Taking the master tea blender as a model I carefully select different yet naturally sympathetic elements to create new blends. The slow application of paint in layers can be likened to the constant blending of cultures over time where these elements become crystallized and localized. Truth settles into fiction the way that myths become consolidated into a culture over centuries and the earth erodes and builds up map contour lines over millenia. Unique content is created via a process of layering and crystallization. What was once contemporary becomes traditional. All that is solid melts into air. How many years does this take? I find the best vehicle for this transmission is paint, which naturally lends itself to blending separate colours to create unusual fabulous new ones. The apparent simplicity of painting disguises the breathtaking alchemy of creating something rich and strange from the humblest of materials. Paint is coloured mud. The process of blending is a form of meditation. A pleasureable, repetitive and relaxing activity. I believe art should be a mix of the sensuous and intellectual, a harmonious blend of both intelligences that speaks to both the head and the heart.
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Papers by Vaishali Prazmari
Traditional Slovak fairytale beginning
იყო და არა იყო რა ... There was and there was not...
Traditional Georgian fairytale beginning
Medieval and Renaissance times were the heyday of islands. They rose in importance during these times; they were part of the trajectory of travel as pilgrimage to travel as conquering. The desert of the Desert Fathers became the European forest, which eventually became the sea; exile on an island as white martyrdom. Irish monks thought of the ocean as a kind of liquid desert. The holy and the hellish moved offshore to islands, which became repositories for marvels and wonders. With Renaissance expansion into Asia, continuing from Medieval times, islands were imagined in the fabulous East, also the location of Paradise and wonders - then as more of the world was mapped, there was a shift from East to West, especially to the Atlantic, as the rise of the Ottoman Empire made the East less accessible. Islands increased in popularity, changing from hovering on the edge of maps to taking a central place in the isolarii (island books), and demanding increasingly detailed mappings of their coastlines and interior geographical features. Columbus (1450-1506) found a continent, but actually, he was looking for islands. Islands formed part of the empires of access that European powers claimed as they forged their paths across oceans. The renaissance of islands and the cult of the isolarii coincided with the actual European Renaissance and islands, or at least the idea of islands, spurred the Age of Discovery itself. There was a yearning for islands, islands imagined as goals, likened to the feminine body. But people’s imagination stayed the same, and they took their myths with them wherever they went. If something didn’t suit, they relentlessly pursued islands until they found something that would fit. Myths are persistent; the Brendan island-legend took centuries to die out. This exploration was ‘conditioned by the imagination’, and insular imagination was crucial to European expansion and acquisition of real geographical knowledge. The word ‘island’ as we understand it today – a landmass completely surrounded by water or suspended in the air – did not come to mean this until Renaissance times. Although Isidore’s Etymologies (c. 560-636) links islands (insula), ‘so called because they are in ‘salt water’ (in salo)’, with the sea, the concept of island in the Middle Ages was broader than today. Anglo-Saxon 'ey' was applied to what we now think of as islands as well as castles, fortresses, blocks of buildings, temples, copses, peninsulas, gardens, rocks in a pond, even people living separately from others. Thus 'iland', 'ysland' and 'insula' were also used to describe any place that was remote or mysterious, and it was not until the sixteenth century that water-locked landmasses were called 'islands' as distinct from continents. The idea of sacred spaces themselves, ‘set apart’ from the everyday, as islands were, is the idea of isolation. The Indo-European root of 'sacer', 'sci', 'skei' (knowledge/science) is 'to cut, compartmentalize, separate'. Indo-European 'akwa', water, morphed into 'iland' under Germanic influences, first appearing in Old English in 888 AD. The ‘s’ in ‘island’ derives from French 'isle', which itself derives from Latin 'insula', and over time, these have coalesced into the single concept of island, a discrete landmass surrounded by water. This discreteness of islands is thrown into particularly sharp focus when we think of floating islands.
‘Hearsay’: hear, and say: we discuss Polo’s second-hand account of a second-hand account – he hears accounts of the marvellous Rukh, then passes on some of his wonder to Rustichello. The Rukh itself takes flight and travels on its own, from the Simorgh of Persian legend to the Griffins and Phoenixes of Europe, from Sindbad’s accounts in the Arabian Nights to the sailors who reported them to Polo, who reported it to Rustichello, who wrote it down in a book – these are the travels of symbols.
Introduction; In the Beginning; Gayumarth - the myth; Gayumarth - the painting; Sultan Muhammad; Persian Miniature painting characteristics; Chinese
influence on Persian miniatures; Timurid influences; Shah Tahmasp; Shahnameh; Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp; Art Historical Writings and Album prefaces; Dust Muhammad; Chest of Witnessing; Artangi Tablet; Rashid al-Din’s Majmu al-Tawarikh or Universal World History; Mirkhond’s Rawzat-us-Safa or Garden of Purity; Leopard Skin; Animals; Animal Symbolism and Shamanism; Rocks; Zoroastrianism; On the Condition of History; On the Condition of the Artist; Mirrors; Sufism.
Fu Hsi; Legend of Fu Hsi; Chinese creation myths; China - Persia cultural exchange; Lao Tzu; Chuang Tzu; Spontaneity; Tao Te Ching; Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly; Mirrors; Sufism and Taoism.
The Knight in the Panther Skin; Bodleian collection, This Fleeting World.
Traditional Slovak fairytale beginning
იყო და არა იყო რა ... There was and there was not...
Traditional Georgian fairytale beginning
Medieval and Renaissance times were the heyday of islands. They rose in importance during these times; they were part of the trajectory of travel as pilgrimage to travel as conquering. The desert of the Desert Fathers became the European forest, which eventually became the sea; exile on an island as white martyrdom. Irish monks thought of the ocean as a kind of liquid desert. The holy and the hellish moved offshore to islands, which became repositories for marvels and wonders. With Renaissance expansion into Asia, continuing from Medieval times, islands were imagined in the fabulous East, also the location of Paradise and wonders - then as more of the world was mapped, there was a shift from East to West, especially to the Atlantic, as the rise of the Ottoman Empire made the East less accessible. Islands increased in popularity, changing from hovering on the edge of maps to taking a central place in the isolarii (island books), and demanding increasingly detailed mappings of their coastlines and interior geographical features. Columbus (1450-1506) found a continent, but actually, he was looking for islands. Islands formed part of the empires of access that European powers claimed as they forged their paths across oceans. The renaissance of islands and the cult of the isolarii coincided with the actual European Renaissance and islands, or at least the idea of islands, spurred the Age of Discovery itself. There was a yearning for islands, islands imagined as goals, likened to the feminine body. But people’s imagination stayed the same, and they took their myths with them wherever they went. If something didn’t suit, they relentlessly pursued islands until they found something that would fit. Myths are persistent; the Brendan island-legend took centuries to die out. This exploration was ‘conditioned by the imagination’, and insular imagination was crucial to European expansion and acquisition of real geographical knowledge. The word ‘island’ as we understand it today – a landmass completely surrounded by water or suspended in the air – did not come to mean this until Renaissance times. Although Isidore’s Etymologies (c. 560-636) links islands (insula), ‘so called because they are in ‘salt water’ (in salo)’, with the sea, the concept of island in the Middle Ages was broader than today. Anglo-Saxon 'ey' was applied to what we now think of as islands as well as castles, fortresses, blocks of buildings, temples, copses, peninsulas, gardens, rocks in a pond, even people living separately from others. Thus 'iland', 'ysland' and 'insula' were also used to describe any place that was remote or mysterious, and it was not until the sixteenth century that water-locked landmasses were called 'islands' as distinct from continents. The idea of sacred spaces themselves, ‘set apart’ from the everyday, as islands were, is the idea of isolation. The Indo-European root of 'sacer', 'sci', 'skei' (knowledge/science) is 'to cut, compartmentalize, separate'. Indo-European 'akwa', water, morphed into 'iland' under Germanic influences, first appearing in Old English in 888 AD. The ‘s’ in ‘island’ derives from French 'isle', which itself derives from Latin 'insula', and over time, these have coalesced into the single concept of island, a discrete landmass surrounded by water. This discreteness of islands is thrown into particularly sharp focus when we think of floating islands.
‘Hearsay’: hear, and say: we discuss Polo’s second-hand account of a second-hand account – he hears accounts of the marvellous Rukh, then passes on some of his wonder to Rustichello. The Rukh itself takes flight and travels on its own, from the Simorgh of Persian legend to the Griffins and Phoenixes of Europe, from Sindbad’s accounts in the Arabian Nights to the sailors who reported them to Polo, who reported it to Rustichello, who wrote it down in a book – these are the travels of symbols.
Introduction; In the Beginning; Gayumarth - the myth; Gayumarth - the painting; Sultan Muhammad; Persian Miniature painting characteristics; Chinese
influence on Persian miniatures; Timurid influences; Shah Tahmasp; Shahnameh; Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp; Art Historical Writings and Album prefaces; Dust Muhammad; Chest of Witnessing; Artangi Tablet; Rashid al-Din’s Majmu al-Tawarikh or Universal World History; Mirkhond’s Rawzat-us-Safa or Garden of Purity; Leopard Skin; Animals; Animal Symbolism and Shamanism; Rocks; Zoroastrianism; On the Condition of History; On the Condition of the Artist; Mirrors; Sufism.
Fu Hsi; Legend of Fu Hsi; Chinese creation myths; China - Persia cultural exchange; Lao Tzu; Chuang Tzu; Spontaneity; Tao Te Ching; Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly; Mirrors; Sufism and Taoism.
The Knight in the Panther Skin; Bodleian collection, This Fleeting World.