Maureen Drdak’s Small Works
The banyan is often mistaken for the holy pipal. The banyan is ‘bar’ in Nepali and is often found in consort with the pipal on chautaris, where they give shade to travellers. Both are of the genus Ficus, and both regarded as holy by Hindus and Buddhists alike.
It does not matter that American artist Maureen Drdak has confused the two trees in naming her latest art exhibition at the Taragaon Museum. The displays are in blue and white, and evoke trees grasping for light and gasping for air as the humans that worship the trees in the name of religion poison the air, soil and water.
Drdak was inspired to render the painting series while on a walk through Kathmandu, when she passed an ageless banyan on a chautari while the diesel exhaust of gridlocked traffic swirled about. Banyans have aerial prop roots that spread over a wide area and drop down from the branches and embed themselves in the soil so the parent tree can suck up water and nutrients.
However, Drdak remembers that this tree’s prop roots had been amputated so as to enclose the branches in the traffic roundabout. For Drdak, the tree’s tragically doomed attempt to reach the earth is a metaphor for nature’s losing battle with human development, of haphazard urbanisation and the malignancy of economic growth.
Seven of the works use precious lapis lazuli and palladium, which symbolise water, and it flows through the paintings like the moisture that travels up the capillaries of the trees. The other three paintings use Drdak’s trademark copper repoussé metalwork which is combined with her canvas. Dradak learned these techniques from Rabindra Shakya of Patan, and has grafted it into her modern work.
Maureen Drdak has always been fascinated by the cross-cultural capabilities of art. She has been expecially inspired by the Patan tradition of repoussé, and translated the timeless Nepali metalcraft into a contemporary ‘repoussé-painting’ art form during her Fulbright stint in Kathmandu.
Her work forms a connection between contemporary western and traditional Nepali art and she says: “My work is an exploration of philosophical and cultural synthesis in which Eastern and Western iconographies are meaningfully integrated”.
Weeping Banyan
By Maureen Drdak
Taragaon Museum and Siddhartha Art Gallery
15-24 February, Taragaon Museum, Hyatt Regency Hotel