Jumaadi : Bed Chamber

I have been interested in trees and wedding dresses for a very long time. I love trees maybe because I grew up in the farm and I did a lot of hiking during my teenage years. My interest in wedding dresses is perhaps due to the color that resembles dried leaves that have been left behind by life. Fragile but complete.

In this work, the wedding dress seems to have been left behind by its owner. She went to a place that nobody knows. What is happening to her? The other possibility is that a boy is putting the wedding dress onto the branch of a tree. The tree grows and becomes the bridegroom. Let’s say it can be trees, mountains, seas, the moon that become the bridegroom. Hearsay there are many invisible brides accompanying us in our journey of life, in the other world.

Trees grow branches. In Arabic, history means "trees". In Wayang performance, in the middle of the segment, there is the tree of life in a triangle form, like a mountain. The wedding dress is torn, signifying that time keeps ticking and moving, and flies away. What is happening? It is not important because memories are recorded in the wind.

The origins of painting in Indonesia have been rediscovered thanks to the cave drawings of Sulawesi, Papua and Kalimantan. In addition to the caves, paintings are found on a variety of mediums, including wooden house panels, paper, cloth, puppets, sculpture and so on. These approaches to painting on non-canvas surfaces appeal to me and I am interested in exploring further.

I lived in Bali between 2009 and 2011. After that, I often visited the island and stayed there for several months at a time.  In Bali, I learnt a lot about traditional art, particularly painting, sculpture and drama. Being in such close proximity to traditional painting made a great impression on me and drove me to develop the existing practice.  

Rain has been my source of inspiration for many years, as it reminds me of tears and Pablo Neruda's poem Rain (Rapa Nui). 

Rain is made of water and is the basis of life. I am not sure if there is anything more romantic than lovers hugging in the rain. They are like ferns, or a pair of trees in the forest. Their legs and bodies suck and absorb the essence of life that is falling from the sky. Roots grow from their legs and create a wooden boat.

Like many other paintings, this work explores and questions the concept of love. It focuses on two different scenarios. Is this pair of angels living in the shadow under the pouring rain and below the lake? Are they flying in the clouds above the sky and between the trees? None of these perspectives is wrong. It is our belief that angels come from another world, or perhaps from a fairy tale, in the manner of fairies or other out-of-this-word creatures. As a Javanese Muslim, I believe that the "other" world (the world of spirituality) does exist inside us and is more real than the world we live in.

For a long time, I have been admiring all kinds of wings, the ones proper to butterflies, dragonflies, birds, as well as dried leaves that look like wings and the scarves in Javanese dance. 

"No man is an island"¹.  We are made of different islands that depend upon each other. The two lovers in this work are angels. They are challenging the strong currents before fate separates them.

1. J. Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624

This work has been inspired to me by Paul Gauguin and Philip Guston. The curtains with red flowers wrap the bed like white and thick hair frame an old woman's face. I have been painting hair using this style for a very long time as it reminds me of a mother's braided hair. 

This work is inspired by a dance drama that I saw in 1996 in Surabaya called The Arrest of Prince Diponegoro, choreographed by the famous Sardono W Kusumo. Prince Diponegoro was a Javanese prince who fought against the Dutch in the early 1800s. This war was financially draning for the Dutch army. During one of the dance scenes, the prince is with a women who is giving him a massage while tiptoeing on her feet and walking on the prince’s back. A very intimate and original portrayal of Java, depicting closeness between two human beings.

This work represents the entanglement between two lovers. Their closeness raises questions on the meaning of eternity. Eternity is an event that is frozen in memories and crystallised into quietness.

One of the most beautiful things in nature is the body of a snake. Snakeskin and its repeating patterns have inspired the art world since the origin of time. 

Drawing this work was not an easy process. At first, I used pencil but the marks slowly disappeared, making it difficult for the carver to follow them.

When we cannot find the missing marks, we loose our sense of direction. However, we are also simultaneously triggered and challenged to finding a new rhythm. The carver is pushed not to follow a pre-existing pattern, opening up new directions and a potential for abstraction instead of pure illustration.

I often draw foetuses and babies inside the mother’s womb, with different mediums: pencil, pen or watercolour. I actually don’t like seeing the images. I feel some sort of fear when I see something that resembles foetuses. They give me goose bumps. It is similar to when I see baby mice. I don’t know the source of the fear but I know that drawing the foetuses is part of the process of forgetting. Forgetting by focusing on the form and creating the right form. The form that is beautiful, like a giant teardrop that becomes the objectivity of the process.

In 1996, I saw the tree burials in Toraja, Sulawesi for the first time in my life. 

When a mother who lost a child looks at the tree, she sees sadness and hope. I cannot imagine the sadness of a mother.  Instead, I picture babies hanging happily from the tree branches, like ripe apples.

This is a prayer tree where sheets of paper filled with prayers are rolled and tied to the branches.