THIRU NEELA KANTAM Collage

Born 1950. In the year 1970 I started playfully working with paper cuttings glueing them together in a bizarre, surrealistic fashion. Later from 1982 on I discovered that creating collages was a way of expressing my dream world. It became kind of a therapy joining contrasting images and various concepts in the field of my perception. The intention of making a collage was always to create a mystical Space that unifies the polar opposites.... DREAMWORLDS: Images of another reality. About forty years ago I experienced an unexpected change in the way of seeing the world. At that time I was living in Rishikesh, India, at the foot of the Himalayas, to learn the classical body postures of Hatha Yoga. One day my teacher sent me to New Delhi to deliver a written message to one of his older disciples. A registered letter would have fulfilled the purpose much easier and cheaper. Maybe it was just a good pretext for me to receive one of the most radical experiences of my life: “Kirti”, he said to me, „in the coming week you should be just like a camera with a wide open lens. Let in all impressions randomly, without being for or against, without interpreting or judging the things you see, evalueing them as ‘bad’ or ‘good’. In order not to get hooked by the judgements and reflections of immediate impressions, remember that there is no film in the camera where a picture could be captured!“ This I practiced zealously and plunged into a blissful drunkenness, into a state of clear vision where all things took on a magical quality. Poetry and painting could convey something of this mood, but I am not a poet nor a painter. Instead, I tried to describe my perception of the world using scissors and glue, joining together cut-out pictures. Not that I experienced events and encounters in the surreal colours you see in my collages! However fascinating the forms and colours may be, I am not interested in representing the visible – nor to distort perception or entertain the senses to divert them from everyday life. I would rather like to draw the attention to the magic of the invisible – the space between, behind and in all things, the play of nearness and distance, the perspectives and unconventional points of view that give new meaning to the manifestations of form. The seamless connection of picture fragments and the flowing into each other of lines and colours outwit the rigid mind that always ‘knows’ exactly what may belong together and what not.