Emerging in my thoughts, guided by walks upon the steppe, are questions of composition and decomposition.

Here, I find animal fragments at varying stages of decomposition. A goat skull with horns and hair still attached; a disappearing skeleton surrounded by wild flowers; a handful of sun-bleached bones—dispersed; a shedding of wool left to disintegrate.

I collect wool from the steppe back to the ger…

Among the many studio visits in Ulaanbaatar, the two whose work inspire me the most are contemporary Mongolian artists Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar and Munkhtsetseg Batmunkh.

Munkhtsetseg Batmunkh’s studio felt gentle, embracing you like a womb. Her nomadic artwork ‘Herd of People’ made of the softest Mongolian wool, hand-rolled into felt then shaped into interlocking pairs is installed amongst different landscapes around the world. Each interlocking pair references the traditional closures of the Mongolian Deel, and our reproductive structures linking together.

Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar’s sculptures feel otherworldly to me. Goat horns feature heavily in many of his works, as well as black and white photograph prints of animal teeth, scowling. The forms appear to be hard and edges are jagged, somehow generating in me a nostalgic sense of groundedness, of being close to the landscape. I think about how different our childhoods must have been.

“For the Mongols, the one God was the Eternal Blue Sky that stretched from horizon to horizon in all four directions. God presided over the whole Earth; he could not be cooped up in a house of stone like a prisoner or a caged animal, nor, as the city people claimed, could his words be captured and confined inside the covers of a book.”(1)

Source:
(1) Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford (2004). Written in English, this non-fiction text was recommended by a Mongolian artist as a decent introduction to Genghis Khan and Mongolian history.

With my hands, I start to process wool collected from the steppe.

Gradually—soil particles, plant debris and oily sections are removed. I divide the wool into 3 portions. Each is hand-spun clockwise into long strands of yarn with the help of a bone fragment also borrowed from the steppe. The 3 strands are braided together, forming a more stable composition.

The traditional technology of braiding is polygenetic and ancient, recorded in artifacts as old as the Bronze-age civilizations such as the Statue of Nykara and his Family (ca. 2455-2350 BCE) of Ancient Egypt(1), and the Dancing Girl (ca. 2500 BCE) of Indus Valley(2). Amongst these diverse cultures is a common thread of braiding hair, not only as adornment but also holding significant cultural, social and spiritual meanings.

Sources:
(1) Brooklyn Museum (www.brooklynmuseum.org/objects/3544)
(2) National Museum, New Delhi (https://www.britannica.com/topic/National-Museum-of-India)

We Are Ephemeral is a site-responsive, disintegrating installation. 

With my own hands, found biomaterial—wool—is transformed through traditional techniques into an ecological sculpture that is left to naturally disintegrate in the landscape. The ephemeral sculpture is fully biodegradable, requiring only energy input and no additional adhesives to hold its composition. 

We Are Ephemeral is a dis/integration spiral.

“What happens if the chain of levels is not linear, but forms a loop? What is real, then, and what is fantasy?”(1) Consciousness is a ‘Strange Loop’—a recursive self-referential phenomenon in the form of a hierarchical spiral—a mathematical curve that emanates from a point moving farther away as it revolves around this point—heard in Bach’s music and seen in Escher’s drawings.

Passing through nature to eternity,
We Are Ephemeral.

Source:
(1) Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1999)