EVE PEARCE

AS A PILGRIM IN LO:  tapestries from beyond the Himalaya

Please join us for a reception with the artist: Saturday, March 2nd, 4-6pm
On view till April 28th, 2024

Speaking from somewhere in my sixth decade of tapestry-making, it’s safe to say that I find this work is not just satisfying but essential.  My imagery reflects an attentive way of working, a continuity of themes I find compelling, and a deepening of the well from which it all draws.

I have lived many years now on my farm in the mountains of Vermont, and have twice journeyed in the Himalayas where I encountered not only the ultimate in mountains but also a path of Buddhist practice.   The tapestries in this show all resulted from a trek I was nudged into taking with my daughter in Lo (British: ”Mustang”), a tiny, medieval, Buddhist kingdom on the back side of the Nepali Himalaya.  It was an extraordinary opportunity.  At the time, the kingdom, once a prosperous trade crossroad, had been sealed and forbidden to outsiders for more than a generation.  We were among the first and very few to be allowed entry.  It was a world apart in which every expression of human life was saturated with Buddhist belief.  I couldn’t have been more a foreigner or more joyously at home.     Here in Vermont I “practice,” I “identify,”  I work at being a “good” Buddhist - a bit of an oddity on the outskirts of the world I live in.  There, I simply,  inextricably “was.”   

For ten years after we came back, I made these tapestries.  I wished with all my heart and whatever skill I could muster, to express and honor what had been given me.  These are unapologetically religious pieces.  Though they have often been out in the world, this is the first time they have been seen together.  Each of them supports the others.  Taken together I trust they communicate something of the power, the wonder of this extraordinary place and time.

Each image is for real.  Most were developed directly from photographs taken by myself, my daughter or our fellow-traveler; one is a compilation of things seen and sensed; and one, just completed, an impression of something puzzling - long and deeply remembered but never “captured.”

More images of my work can be seen on my “artist’s page” at the American Tapestry  Alliance web site:  americantapestryalliance.org.;   in catalogs for the ATA Biennials V, VII, VIII and XI;  and in two books: The Art is the Cloth, Micala Sidore, 2020  and Tapestry Handbook:  the Next Generation,  Carol Russell,  2007, both published by Schiffer Publishing.