AHN NEWS: SUMMER 2008
Summer is a wonderful time for both TRAVEL and READING, and so this issue of AHN NEWS features books recently published by three women artists, each of whom has traveled the world creating their own form of healing art. The first is Vijali Hamilton, whose book World Wheel: One Woman’s Quest for Peace chronicles her multi-year journey around the globe working with indigenous communities to create artworks that heal and honor the earth. The second is Basia Irland, whose book Water Library presents her artistic explorations of water – both honoring this resource and raising awareness about its troubled state. The third and last, is photographer Paola Gianturco, whose book Women Who Light the Dark shares inspirational projects around the world being done by women who are using the imagination to revitalize their communities and solve societal problems.
May this issue fill you with the joy that books provide so well – offering inspiration and exploration of new places and ideas.
-Mary Daniel Hobson, Director, Arts & Healing Network
FEATURED BOOK:
World Wheel: One Woman’s Quest for Peace
By Vijali Hamilton
In the mid 1980’s, Vijali Hamilton began her remarkable series of projects called the World Wheel. Over seven years, she created twelve spokes in 12 different international locations – in each she collaborated with native people and the environment to create sculptures and performances that heal community and honor the earth. This colorful, well-illustrated book recounts her journey. Each chapter describes a spoke of the wheel in places as diverse as Tinos in Greece, West Bengal in India, and Shoro Terdom in Tibet, as well as places closer to home like Malibu, California. Each chapter about the World Wheel is interspersed with a chapter about Vijali’s earlier life describing her path of personal healing and becoming an artist. She shares very openly about her life’s evolving journey, her spiritual connection, and the adventures of creating healing artworks in diverse cultures. The book ends with a new beginning – ushering in a second turning of the World Wheel dedicated to the world’s children.
Below is an excerpt from her book from Chapter Five: World Wheel, Spoke Three, Alicante Spain, 1988:
“New friends from the conference in Madrid had invited me to another mountain in the Alicante area by the Mediterranean Sea. Now I was free to accept their offer. Joaquin decided to go with me to the next site and continue his apprenticeship as a sculptor. Luckily, a friend of Joaquin’s arrived in his car. The crunch of tires was music to my ears. We both stayed at the friend’s house while I located a car to buy, an old Citroen for one hundred dollars.
The new site was different altogether. As soon as we arrived, my body relaxed and my breath came easier. Centuries ago, the Moors had inhabited this land, a thriving work community. They had built terraces and vineyards and small stone cottages for shepherds and laborers. Each house had rooms for goats and donkeys, so that families and animals lived together. But blight had spread through the vineyards and, after a failed attempt at fruit orchards, the community had dispersed, leaving the stone houses to crumble into the semi-ruins they are today. The valley descended straight to the Mediterranean, about a twenty minute walk away, and meandering streams culminated in dramatic waterfalls on their way to the sea.
The owner of the land, Jan Semmel, a Madrid artist and writer I had met at the conference, gave Joaquin and me one of the small stone houses in which to live. Moreover, trusting my relationship with the earth and stone, he gave me complete freedom to create as I liked, only viewing the sculptures two months later at the final ceremony.
Joaquin and I cleared the land and dug the dirt away from around a large boulder in front of a stonewall in ruins behind the cottage. I saw the stone as the east point of an Earth Wheel. It looked like an eagle with outstretched wings flying out of the earth. To the west of this circle were two trees with a feeling of a passageway between them. I felt this was my own passageway into a new situation of joy and cooperation.
Eventually another person came to help – Cristina Serrentino, an herbalist from the United States and an Italian beauty with a Mona Lisa presence. I had met her at the Seneca Reservation during the Women’s Council. When she first arrived in Spain, I couldn’t sleep for two nights – to have a woman friend to talk to in English!
I wrote in my journal, July 3, 1988:
Today is the day of Las Piedras, The Stones. The three of us disassembled the crumbling ends of the stone wall leaving the center portion intact where a large boulder was embedded. The stone reigns over the land like a Madonna in a cathedral. As shadows fell across its surface, I saw a woman rising from the stone, her arms upraised to the heavens. The north point of the Earth Wheel pointed toward her. Joaquin, who has disassembled ruins before, warned us that it would be hard work removing the many stones built into the thick wall, and, at the end of this first day, I understand too well what he meant. It will take two more days with three of us working in a line, handing stones from person to person. I have been relocating them in other forms as they come out of the wall, and already have built a retaining wall to protect against erosion and have made a circle from the large stones, completing the Earth Wheel. 
When the sun went behind the mountain, we finally stopped work. Our muscles ached and yet, as we walked back to the cottage, we joyfully collected red crystals we found mixed with the earth shining underfoot.
When we arrived at the cottage we built a fire immediately because the house is like a big refrigerator, built for summer use only. The wind comes in around the doors and windows, so we eat, study, write, and draw all huddled by the fire. The huddling is the best. On the personal level, this is what the World Wheel is about – developing a world family. Yes, I feel that today.”
This softcover book has 237 pages and was published by World Wheel Press in 2007. To order a copy or to learn more about Vijali’s work, please visit www.vijali.net.
FEATURED BOOK:
Water Library
By Basia Irland
“This book is constructed of watery pages. Splashes soak your arms each time a page is turned. Other pages are frozen and require wool gloves and an ice pick to read. One volume is salty and can be broken off to season food or melt sidewalk ice. Part of the manuscript forms an enormous sponge to absorb pollution. Medicinal seaweed paragraphs counteract waterborn diseases when the words are swallowed. Some of the pages are buoyant and can be read while floating in a pond. The bibliography inflates to form a kayak, drifting on an unnamed river at dusk, accompanied by a constellation of fireflies.” – Basia Irland
So begins the very poetic introduction to Water Library, a book exploring the art and ideas of Basia Irland – sculptor, installation artist, poet, book artist, and an activist in water issues. This elegant hard cover book is full of color illustrations, interviews with Irland, and essays by a variety of writers including Lucy Lippard, Kathleen Howe, and David Williams. Each of the nine chapters (called volumes) is dedicated to different themes in Irland’s work – topics such as Salinity, Source to Sea, Polluted Waters, Receiving Rain and Conserving Water, and the Ecology of Reverence. What emerges from reading this book is a full picture of an artist who has truly dedicated herself for over 20 years to the muse of water – in all its forms and variations.
Irland’s work both honors the resource of water and raises awareness about environmental issues such as toxicity. She often weaves in the element of pilgrimage in her work by creating elegant objects to be worn on her back that function as log books during her river walking journeys (see photo here). In other projects, she engages river communities using art to answer the question how can diverse communities living along any river in the world work and celebrate together on a grass-roots community level to raise awareness and help save a river, a stream, or a creek? In her project, “A Gathering of Waters,” Irland traveled to different river communities such as the Rio Grande in New Mexico, the Don River in Ontario, Canada, the River Dart in Devon, England and the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. At each site, she created an interactive/collaborative art performance in which a special canteen - called the River Vessel - was passed by the carrier downstream from one community to the next. Small water samples were added from each community as hundreds of people extended a hand to someone upstream, received the River Vessel, added their own contribution of water from the river, wrote in the log book, and passed these items along to another person downstream. A twenty-minute documentary was created about the Rio Grande portion of this project – to learn more about it, click here. Altogether the projects in this book form a beautiful and inspiring compilation for anyone interested in environmental art.
This hard cover book has 248 pages and was published by University of New Mexico Press in 2007. To learn more about the book, please visit http://www.unm.edu/~basia/BIRLAND/
To learn more about Basia Irland, please visit her page on the greenmuseum.org’s web site at http://greenmuseum.org/c/enterchange/artists/irland/.
FEATURED BOOK:
Women Who Light the Dark
By Paola Gianturco
Photojournalist Paola Gianturco has traveled the globe from Africa to South America and beyond to record inspirational stories of women who are using their imagination to heal issues like war, poverty, illiteracy and more. The result is this richly illustrated book, chronicling in first person Gianturco’s experience meeting these outstanding women. For example, in Zimbabwe, Betty Makoni founded the Girl Child Network to help girls empower and protect themselves against a pandemic of rape as well as offering girls education, counseling and support, including the use of poetry and performance as healing tools. I was struck while reading this book, how most of these women turned to the creative arts as a catalyst for healing and positive change. It really is a testament to the universal power of the arts to invoke transformation.
All the projects in this book are linked by having each been funded by the Global Fund for Women, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. To honor this anniversary, Gianturco selected 15 projects out of hundreds funded by the Global Fund for Women and then spent one week with each grantee selected. Gianturco approached this project as a collaboration, working with each woman to tell as interesting a story as possible. Each story is told as a first person narrative written by Paola Gianturco, accompanied by her colorful and hope-filled photographs. By purchasing this book, you will be supporting the Global Fund for Women. By reading this book, you can’t help but be deeply inspired by the courageous and creative work these women are doing to light the dark.
Below is an excerpt from the Introduction by Paola Gianturco:
“Across the world, local women are helping one another tackle the problems that darken their lives – domestic violence, sex trafficking, war, poverty, illiteracy, discrimination, inequality, malnutrition, disease. These women may lack material resources, but they possess a wealth of an even more precious resource: imagination. And their imaginations light the dark.
Moroccan women create and produce plays that educate illiterate people about women’s rights. Girls in Zimbabwe compose and perfom poetry that shocks communities into fighting child rape. In Viet Nam, counselors heal survivors of domestic violence – who are so traumatized they won’t allow themselves to be touched – by turning on music and starting line dances. Teachers in India invent puppet shows that help homeless children understand AIDS. Brazilian math teachers inspire their girls from the favelas to learn arithmetic by originating fashion shows. Roma women in Slovakia collaborate with non-Roma women to design postcards, kindling communication in place of suspicion. Lesbians in Argentina, develop and stage street skits, demonstrating against discrimination. A master ballet teacher instructs a thousand poor Cuban children in classical dance….
The women you are about to meet are showing us how to use our time, talent, resources, and imagination to cause change. I hope their stories will inspire you to join them, perhaps by supporting organizations like the Global Fund for Women, for surely it will take all of us working together to kindle new hope and possibilities in our world.”
Women Who Light the Dark was published in 2007 by Power House Books as a large hardback book with 239 pages including many color photographs. To purchase a copy, please click here.
Paola Gianturca was recently interviewed by Britt Bravo on the Big Vision Podcast. Click here to listen to this interview.
To learn more about Paola’s work and Women Who Light the Dark, please visit www.womenwholightthedark.com
READERS RESPOND
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