Jyoti Sahi: Art as integrative process

On Friday night I went to hear the artist Jyoti Sahi speak at St Andrews Waterloo, an event organised by Christians Aware.

Jyoti set up the Indian School of Art for Peace, or INSCAPE, in 1984 with the idea of relating art to Indian spirituality. INSCAPE was a concept of an art school, modeled on the understanding of an ashram that Rabindranath Tagore created at Shantiniketan, north of Calcutta, in Birbhum district. Here the "Sadhana" or spiritual practice of the ashram is based on an understanding of the spiritual in art. Art is understood in a very broad sense, comprising not only the visual arts, but also story telling, poetry, and performance art. An attempt is made to realize a connective aesthetics in which the different arts support each other in a common search for wholeness.

Jyoti spoke about art as process, not simply as product, with that process also being a healing process needed by our contemporary society. His presentation was a journey through his artworks which saw art and creativity as a basis for spirituality.

He spoke about art as meditation and, in particular, of Ignatian imagination as a way of prayer. He spoke too of art and the imagination as process of finding integration and this most of all was what seemed modelled in his art where he integrated the stories and imagery of India's religions, tribes and castes with those of Christianity in a vision which ultimately sees life as a cosmic dance in which the yoke or yoga of Jesus is, through the cross, to unite the whole cosmos.

Jyoti's art is unitive and reconciling yet was originally based on and inspired by the angst and inner struggle of the German Expressionists (Emil Nolde, in particular) which he first saw as an art student in England. His great achievement has been to harness the force and energy of these Expressionist roots and channel them to form movements and confluences which bring opposites (pure/impure, male/female, ying/yang) together  creating a plant which can rise from the depths and bring forth blossom.

Richard Harries (Lord Harries of Pentregarth, former Bishop of Oxford) writes in his foreword to Faces of Vision: Images of Life and Faith by Jyoti Sahi & Eric Lott: "In these paintings humanity and nature come together as part of God's whole (creation). Jyoti brings before us in a way that is at once vivid and mysterious, the reality of the one God....The face of Christ opens out into the universal." 

Faces of Vision presents major themes in Jyoti's outpouring of evocative images. 'Life's Journey', 'Earth's Epiphanies', 'The Body, Broken & Whole', 'Transfiguring Vision' include pictures and reflective comment on such key images as Mother, Pilgrim, Seed, Tree, Fire, Drummer, Healer, Mystic, Bird, Dancer, and many more.



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Innocence Mission - God Is Love.