A kiss in the sky

The Inuit and Native Americans make a new song when they have no words to describe a feeling. They sing with their eyes shut because they believe that only then can one be in contact with the inner self, the soul, and only then is one able to really sing. When I sing like that, I lose track of time, allowing intuitive compositions to ebb and flow. I communicate with the audience, not in a literal way but through an invisible, sensitive form of contact. If I were to do this performance with no one present to witness it, the work would still have the same relevance for me.
With every tone sung the air becomes charged with a mysterious presence.

I am performing, it is at a theatre festival in a colourful and noisy environment. I move along hesitantly, dressed in grey, with a grey mask and cradling in my arms a grey ceramic trumpet as if it were a baby. I blend with the solitary grey of the architecture in the square. The mask protects me from having eye contact with the people. In a chosen space I stop and sit down. Taking off the mask and with my eyes closed I begin to sing. For a long time I keep on singing and blowing into the instrument to search for an own dimension amongst the chaos of noises. Gently the tones mix with the sounds of the city. My eyes remain closed to hold on to my concentration. I experience a contact with something invisible, my sub consciousness, a former life, God, infinity; there are endless names that can never come close to describing it. What it is not is an everyday thing.

I have always thought, ever since I first experienced this energy, that it is like an invisible transparent cloud, hanging in the air, there for anyone who chooses to reach it. I remember the exact time and place that I became conscious of it. Working in a small room, concentrated and alone, I was making a tree out of bleached branches and cows' bones which were cooked clean. Like a long stretched spine the bones were connected by an iron wire and hung from the ceiling, the branches protruding from their holes. As I observed the sculpture it was as if I was given a glimpse of another world, which gave me an awareness of the presence of something beyond the material in my work. This was a landmark experience, a fascinating moment that made me curious for more.

I don't remember ever having made a conscious decision to become an artist. My life rolled and tumbled like a snowball and every time I thought it could not go on any further, something happened to move things onwards. On this journey I have found the time and confidence to explore my talents, to express my feelings and to give form to my ideas. I have become aware of the importance of the qualities of continuity and tenacity, which enabled me to strengthen the connection with my subconscious. I believe this connection can be nurtured and trained in a similar way that an athlete may train his or her muscles in order that creativity may flow more freely.

Clay with no form invited me to make what I wanted to, defining and giving shape to internal images, watching for moments of recognition, of sadness and of joy and being moved. The directness and the ephemeral quality of the material and also the scale I chose to work at challenged me to make accurate definitions. I searched for and found timeless moments. In the dumb and dead material new poetic worlds were revealed.

In dirty clothes, covered with clay and almost a sculpture myself, I walk through the wealthy city, over the old bridge, taking in the fur coats and the smell of perfume. In the studio I am making a two-metre sculpture from brown clay of a naked man. The model is a very beautiful, blond and muscular man. I study the anatomy and work from my observations. If the sculpture is anatomically incorrect it will disturb the expression I search for. I work in isolation and concentration. Unexpectedly another artist enters my studio and qualifies my sculpture as Übermensch. Shocked by his remark and confused to realise that this work can be seen as offensive, I stop working for the moment. I had not been aware of the possibility for an interpretation so different than the one I was focussing on. Entranced by inspiration and everything I knew and felt, I had not been aware of a blind spot, I had not seen my ignorance. Where are the bounds for what I can make and put into this world? Is it possible to make work that is free from social and political judgement?

The sculpture changed to a primitive looking man, modelled very roughly, with long arms, big hands and big feet. He looks up as if to move away with his thoughts from this world and despite his size he looks like a vulnerable human being.

The last work that I make in Maastricht is called Respect for authority (Sense of awe). In the streets I keep on seeing rectangular pedestals with stiff modelled portraits on top of them. It fascinates me that these two things are so separate. I want to make a pedestal and a portrait in one piece, not stiff but vivid and baroque. I pile up an enormous quantity of clay in my studio. Aspects of Maastricht meet in the work while contemplating on experiences I had during my time living there. Associations with the sensual excesses of life and the God Bacchus dance together in my head; the brass- or drum bands that play every Saturday in the streets are translated into form. In the evening in the bar I see the pictures of James Ensor come alive; white painted faces, bright red lips and purple veined cheeks are like scenes from a carnival. The city is like one big cosy living room. In the morning I rise with a holiday feeling because I live in a beautiful environment and the sun seems to shine more often than where I was before. These observations come together and find form in the big sculpture; the modelling of her final expression as a joyful game that holds the positive feelings of life; the sun, the god of grapes, in a tipsy mood toasting and mocking the all too serious art world; saying goodbye to a special time.

I needed to acquire more knowledge. I needed to discover more about the world and decided to go travelling. I was invited by a gallery in America to give lectures about an exchange project I joined, and to talk about my work. On the second day, I met a young man who told me he was a sculptor and that he had recently sold some sculptures to The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I looked at him, quite frankly, in disbelieve. He took me to his studio in a big warehouse in Cincinnati and we talked all night. He invited me to come back for a period of three months to assist him with his work for his upcoming exhibition in Los Angeles. I would be living at the three-story warehouse and working for him in return. This would be the first of many trips to the United States, travelling to Los Angeles, San Francisco and to New York. Away from home and all that I was familiar with, I found the freedom and space to draw my own vision and was able to let a new light shine on my work and life.

Back in the Netherlands.
Rain, rain and more rain. My possessions are stored in a condemned house in a beautiful area between the Netherlands and Belgium. I decide to move in too and part of the house becomes my studio. It is cold and damp. Loneliness, no work, no money; my life is like a heavy moving wooden carriage pulling its wheels through thick heavy mud. Everything looks grey.

I find a new house in a different city and I go to live at a studio in a squatted factory shared by ten artists. There is an agreement between us to organise one art event a year in order to provide the possibility for creative vitality and interchange between artists. I organise a performance festival entitled ‘Great Britain Performances' and in collaboration with a London artist we invite two male and three female performance artists to take part. He writes a long poem and invites me to work on his performance, asking me to write the music for his poem and to sing during his performance. I stand on a small shelf, fixed high up on the wall; on two consecutive days I sing for four hours continuously. The room has beautiful acoustics; entirely white at the beginning of the performance and now slowly changing by his drawings.
This was my first introduction to performance and I was immediately drawn into it.

I love the movement and directness in performance; the intensity of the communication, the impermanence, the ever-changing sense of time, not fixed to any particular moment, the possibility to experiment and to have an intense discussion, the misunderstanding in the audience at first and then their acceptance and curiosity later on. I love the contact, which is so sensitive that I can't find words for it.

My second performance is almost a year later. I have been making photographs of myself, and there is one particular series that motivates me to do another performance. I am naked and completely covered with black body paint, I become like a shadow in a very large white space. In collaboration with a Swiss artist who places five hundred of his drawings in a careful pattern on the floor of the hall, I perform in the far back. At the end I walk in circles behind him and slowly a black line is drawn on the floor by the passing of my feet. I sing in German, philosophical texts that have been chosen by the Swiss artist.

In New York I am walking up and down the seventy-two steps that lead to the gallery where I have organised an exhibition in co-operation with four other artists. I carry a paraffin wax sculpture in my hands, it is burning and the wax drips onto my black dress. This performance feels like an endless descent into the dark. Time goes by slowly, stretching out until the gallery shuts.

The performances take me to many places, I travel to Norway and France, to South Africa and Japan, my work becoming coloured by each new experience as images awake and unfold.

By doing performances I have learned that silence can communicate to us as intensely as sound, that silence can make people very quiet. In Tokyo, I performed for seven hours in a specially prepared space, afterwards moving into a large room where the opening of the exhibition was being held. Groups of people murmured together. I sat on a high table, and sang gently into a long, thick bamboo tube. Slowly the people became very silent. This made a deep impression on me. I sang more and more quietly, eventually whispering to prolong the silence as long as I could, slowing down time.

Another aspect I learned by doing performances is the importance of concentration. As a preparation for the work that I did in Tokyo, I fasted for several days. This was a way to direct all my energy to the work. I have seen performances by artists where hardly any action took place; nevertheless the attention of the audience was held by the intensity of the artist's concentration. This for me is a mysterious communication and a fascinating phenomenon.

In contrast to impressive silence I witnessed a performance by an American artist, an improvisation played on synthesizers. It started so loudly that I thought it could not get any louder, yet the sound grew slowly until the space was entirely filled by its vibrations. I experienced this as the opposite yet complementary side of silence, a genial, wonderful moment of beauty. So much sound that for the artist it probably went beyond and was no longer of importance to reach the audience but to be entirely led by his imagination, from an exceedingly strong concentration.

At a later moment I play again with silence. Now I am teaching in an academy in Germany and have organised a performance festival in co-operation with a Kunstverein. I invite the performance group The Wolves of whom I am a member and three other artists. The oppressive feeling during my time in Germany is one of isolation and not belonging. The image is covered in tar and feathers, I am dressed in black, wearing a stinking, tarred coat and big black shoes; my hat, specially designed, is filled with goose down. I am the last of seven artists to perform, being black through and through. The concentration builds up, the Jacques Brel song that I am singing carefully interweaves with the silence, and the feathers swirl weightlessly, forming a white frame for the black image.

It is the last day of this series of performances, I am wearing a white dress as if I were a bride. My whole face and my hands, folded on my lap, are enclosed in a thin layer of plaster. I am performing under a large white domed roof. My eyes are shut. I am sitting in the middle of the space. I hear the people entering the room, wait for them to stop moving, crack my hands free from the plaster and scratch it away from my face, breaking the hard material from my skin. The sound of the plaster, like broken porcelain hitting the floor, echoes in the room. My voice comes from far away, exploding and filling all the open spaces of the hall. I am overcome by the intensity of emotion, and feel taken to an unknown place. This is pure energy, which charges through me. It surprised me that the time that had passed in the performance was much shorter in reality than the endlessness that I had experienced. I decide to concentrate in my next works on holding on to silence or crescendo for a much longer time in order to take the audience with me on a longer journey.

The photographic part of my work seems to come from a more vague and further consciousness. The prints seem to emerge from the far depths of the earth.
I remember no photo session in particular and yet I remember them all. They are private scenes in a closed space with the camera as a witness.
Made with the passing rhythm of time, the images appear; I have seen them before in a vision or a dream. The prints are being lifted from a hot developing tank, and immediately it is clear to me whether the image is powerful or not. The photograph is like a drawing, revealing its lines on the surface of the paper. The technique is of no importance; it is a means to an end. The whole process is magical and that is what fascinates me. I can be anybody. I am a woman, naked, smeared with clay, I am a bold man with a teddy bear and wearing a hat, my black suit creased and my white shirt hanging out of my trousers, I am standing on my bare feet. I work in a factory, my head bandaged and my knees damaged. In the same way, I can be a Spanish woman in a white embroidered dress looking out over the landscape. I walk with a temper out of the frame, my big stiff jacket swinging around my legs. I put clay on my face and scream, the sound disappearing into the paper.

For several months I had been working at making a film for a performance in Utrecht. The work was an intellectual process and I felt the need to do something physical. I received a phone call asking me if I would like to join a stone symposium in Scotland for two months. Never having worked in stone before I thought that this would be a chance to do some physical work and to learn about stone as a material.
I would not work in stone any more but I met an artist with whom I would be working intensively the following two months: a blind sculptor who took me into his world of not seeing, making me acutely aware of an accurate observation of atmospheres, smells and spaces, showing me that the world can be a totally different place than the one I observed through my eyes.

The crane slowly lowers the bronze sculpture on to its foundation. Three stainless steel pins match with the bolts previously attached inside the sculpture. The sculpture is called Muse and I have made it for the entrance to a home for blind and partially sighted people. It is about two metres in height and represents a bowing female giant, a queen who makes a gesture of welcome, her arm bending into the folds of her cape. In her head there is a small wind organ that plays when the wind blows; the twinkling inspiration of her thinking. The side of the sculpture that is visible from the road looks like the image of a woman while her other side is modelled like an old tree. As an entity the sculpture gives the illusion that the piece is the fifth tree in the row of trees that is already there. Her presence is natural and her colours blend with the green of the trees. During the unveiling of the sculpture, it remains quiet, until the people who live in the home approach it all at once, their many hands touching it, giving new meaning to it.

He was studying image and colour in ceramic and glazes. I tried to describe the blue which we found, the blue of heaven, the blue of eyes, marine blue. No, it was not what he was searching for, he was looking for a hard, Mediterranean blue, not a cobalt blue and not a passionate or blood red, no a bright, flat intense red. I try to express the appearance of colours with words, to describe them as precisely as possible. Images are not made by the eyes but by the mind.
The blind man taught me to see colours.

Another moment. My love died. He fell down the stairs and died instantly.
The next morning at seven o'clock I called his studio. The phone was not answered. I heard the news not much later when I drove there to see him, repeating to myself, broken leg, broken leg, broken leg. In the church in Italy I sang at his funeral because he could not leave with only tears, but with the grace and the beauty that suited him. I sang a song about de Vergin d'Amor, Virgin of love, and I felt all the sorrow of all the people in the church, looking straight into infinity. This was not my life; this was a world that was superimposed like a film over it. I walked with his mother, while supporting her with my arms, at the front of a kilometre-long procession to the cemetery in the typical Italian mountain village.

The next day at the cemetery an old woman appears as if she was an angel, and tells me in Dutch that it is special for me to have lived with a blind man. The presence in the church and in the small streets of five Franciscan monks with three knots in the rope around their hips give the scene a medieval entourage. Every living thing takes on a new meaning. While walking across the grass I avoid stepping on the daisies; they may not be trampled.

Life is like a maze; it does not show how to deal with strong and unexpected emotions. I feel handicapped, crippled, bleeding, with nowhere to go, no one to talk to, no way out. Pain, endless pain, what is happening, nothing will ever be the same. I throw myself into my work, but even that does not help me any more. God, give me a sign.

The first consolation I find in my work; drawing and modelling a big sculpture that I had started to work on while he was still alive. As if engaged in a whispered conversation with my beloved. His words come back to me in everyday situations; a slow goodbye, becoming conscious of the inevitability of change and finality.

I rise, go into the woods, scream at the trees, cry and see dancing skeletons waving at me from a spinning carrousel. Grief.

Farewell.
Somebody is a thousand million light years away.
He is not anymore, not here anymore, I have to say goodbye. I wish him well on his journey, gate, gate, param, gate.....*
A big black ball explodes in my head.

A NEW ERA

It is time for reflection. I am in a place that is like paradise, eating organically grown tomatoes from the garden and wholegrain rice. I am surprised to recognise old-fashioned smells in the countryside and to spot butterflies that I never see in Holland any more. Butterflies as large as a fist, yellow, blue, black and brown.
The landscape is breath-taking and always changing, a rich and refreshing environment. If I think of photographing the poppy flowers one day, they will be gone the next, replaced by a field of golden wheat. Mountain paths which are possible to hike along this week will be cut off a month later, obstructed by brambles, shrubbery and fallen trees. From my house there is always the view of a small medieval village, Madremanya, the Great Mother. The earth sifts through my fingers as I plant the leeks and onions in the ground.

A little Cuban girl from the neighbourhood gives me a trompeta de la muerte;
a beautifully formed mushroom. For the first time in months, I am making a new sculpture in clay, a grey trumpet, with a fleshy red inside.

I find a box filled with second-hand black clothes. A performance for Greenland slowly forms. I am making my costume, a thick coat for the cold, put together with all kinds of old clothing, I am thinking of African Fetish sculptures, I am thinking of how the skin wrinkles with experience, I am thinking that everything is soaked in its own history. I decorate the jacket with beautiful, bought beads and decorative elements.
I will wrap my hair with leftover material, long ribbons knotted together; smear my face with charcoal, like the Inuit do. I am listening to Alina by Arvo Pärt and know not of a more beautiful music, so simple and so silent. The Inuit in Greenland close their eyes when they sing, because then they can look inside themselves. I realise again that silence is just as important as the making of sound. During the performance every movement becomes important; the concentration grows, a child coughs, a mobile telephone rings, listen... Later when we travel north, a conversation evolves in which I imitate careful sounds from the audience, playfully and concentrated the performance evolves. Somebody in the village later asks if the mumbling figure will die. No applause, it remains quiet. It is beautiful to dissolve in the dark.

...Applause. That applause breaks the silence. It is a tradition originating in ancient Greek theatre, whereby the world created by the actors must come to an end when the play is over. To bring us back to this world, we clap our hands together and wake ourselves up. After a performance the images stay with us and we take them back into life and into our dreams. When there is no applause, the thread is not cut and the vision can travel with us on the waves of our consciousness.

The sun is back again. I am back in Spain.
The bicycle with white roses decorates everyday life, its tour through the landscape with the wind as a warm embracement. Oranges, almonds, sunflowers and fresh figs are growing. The meal is open for everyone to join; there is always enough food.
Where am I now? I am in a forest; at the end of a path is a ruin, which I can never find my way back to again. The cork oaks with their black skins form a picture, which I only know vaguely from films and which overwhelm me by surprise every time I see them. In the evenings a fox or a wild boar crosses the road like a phantom.
I dream about a house where I discover new rooms time after time; a house that gets bigger and bigger and where in every new room there is a door leading to yet another room.

A warm embrace, safe again.
An image appears of a tree, which starts as a seed, grows, forms buds and blossoms, then flowers and is full of colour. The eyes open again and they are looking clearly at the blue sky. This is a different space for creating new stories, yet another reality synchronized with my life.

Anet van de Elzen, September 2003, Madremanya

• Gate, Gate, Param gate, Parasamgate, Bodhi Svaha
Comes from a sacred text of the Budhhist Mahayana School. The text is one of the most important, called the Prajna Paramita (Excellent Wisdom). The prayer is a mantra to be chanted which will help the chanter to transcend the limits of duality. It is also used particularly by devotees of the Chan and Zen schools when a person dies to send energy to that person on his/ her journey as well as for the person remaining in life to let go.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I find myself at the top of a mountain, convinced that I can look out over the whole world and choose where I want to be. Paths and roads go down, to my right and left, behind and in front of me. I can walk them or I can stay put. I can choose where I want to go and then go there. 

This is an acquired freedom.