II. Mustang
“Beneath the mountains, deserts, forests and steppes of High Asia; beneath the hugely diverse people, cultures, histories and ecologies of this vast area, an ancient river flows.
It’s a river of imagery, of metaphors from nature, of stories and dreams. Its waters have nourished these people’s imagination since prehistoric times, given the tools for protecting themselves from the relentless forces of a harsh world. The material substance of these tools are trees, rocks, horns and clay.
But their structure is ritual and that is what gives them their visual power.
They are what Alfred Gell called the ‘technologies of enchantment’.
They have survived the formalities of establishment religion, often by being the work of the outsider, the common householder. Or the shaman…
…They are piles of horns on the mountain pass, and the horned tip of a stripped pine tree. They could be red clay breasts sprouting horns and nipples…
They are the clay effigies that guard the entrance to a village, looking weird and deranged. They could be attractive and sensual…
They are the trees splashed with sacred colours, far older than the people who tend them; the tree is a ladder to the sky with a young shaman suspended for initiation. They could be the root dwelling of a tree spirit…
They are.
Gell saw the art of all cultures as just technology of enchantment. It can transform the mundane into the sacred and every day into mystery. That is what I have always tried to achieve with my paintings.”
Between 1992-1997 Rob joined three expeditions to restricted areas of Mustang on the Nepal/Tibet border as part of a multi-disciplinary research project funded by the German Research Foundation through the Bon University. During these trips, he was able to document much of the region’s traditional architecture and gather inspiration for his future Mustang artworks. These went on to become part of his critically acclaimed exhibition, ‘Earth Door, Sky Door, Paintings of Mustang’ in 1999 which quickly caught the attention of the global art world and introduced them to his work.
Houses in Lo Manthang, Mustang, Nepal
