Japanese festival of ‘Tanabata’

I recently had more thoughts on work for ‘Inside Out’ at Tremough and connections with the Japanese festival of ‘Tanabata’.

See painting: “Flowering Cherry and Autumn Maples with Poem Slips” 1654/81.Tosa Mitsuoki. Image at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tosa_Mitsuoki_-_Flowering_Cherry_and_Autumn_Maples_with_Poem_Slips_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

To collect some responses to the orchard work for ‘Inside Out’, we invited people to write their thought on slips of paper which we hung from one of the orchard trees. After the end of the project, I remembered something I’d come across earlier in the year:

Festival of 'Tanabata’ and the custom of 'Tanzaku’

This is a Japanese star festival remembering the lovers Orihume and Hikoboshi, 2000 year old mythological figures, separated by the 'River in Heaven’ - i.e. the Milky Way. It is celebrated by the custom of 'Tanzaku’ - wishes (sometimes in the form of poetry) written on pieces of paper hung in bamboo trees, then afterwards often burnt or set afloat down river. The folding screen shown here depicts this, the delicateness of the slips emphasised by pale pastel colours, contrasting with the mysterious dusky space beyond, representative of man’s fleeting voice in comparison with vast nature, the innermost wishes of people carried away on the wind. 

Themes here of nature and man, decay and the ephemeral I think had many links with my own work. I accepted the inevitable decay of my drawings left outside, caught up in nature’s powerful unconscious forces -  a kind of release however, allowing more powerful, universal forces to run their course. In a similar way, with 'Tanzaku’, people released their hopes to nature, allowing the future to unfold as it will.

With recent drawing work preoccupied with interaction between man and nature, and ruination, I’ve been thinking about passage of time in nature’s decay. In further work, I would like to continuing looking at how we relate ourselves to these vast unknown forces, both enchanted by (shown in myths and rituals such as this) and in terror of forces of the sublime yet destructive.