Monday,
June 10, 2002
Godlund's Art: Not
Reality But What You Saw!
Human perspectives
may be whimsical, dissembling and sometimes disastrous. But they exist
and say a lot about our inner world, reports DAVID KAIZA
It is difficult to write about
Birgitta Godlund's art. The seriousness with which she approaches her work
renders trivial the adjectives that are the stock in trade of art writing.
Because each painting says something important about life, it is difficult
also to typecast her work.
What does a field look like
before it is wracked by a storm, and can an artist say why a forest must
be protected without the usual rhetoric?
In Godlund, you suspect that
it is more the fact that we perceive the world and not that it exists,
which counts. The sense that a forest is delicate or can be hurt, or that
the streets of Lamu are teeming with surprises and that your children are
not in the park, are sharply actualised under her brush.
It is a complex, multilayered
communication but one which achieves a certain magical recognition.
Titled Inside/Outside
Africa, her last exhibition in Uganda made the point that it matters
not where we come from nor who we are but that inside, we are all really
the same. And this is not a socio-political message. Nor is it rhetoric.
It is humanistic in the basic sense that it provokes questions about reality,
cements the bonds among people everywhere and makes you feel stronger about
yourself.
The proceeds from the exhibition
will support the women's wing at Lira Prison. Godlund has spent the past
eight years in East Africa with her husband, the Swedish ambassador to
Uganda. Her art is a kind of diplomacy in itself.
Where Westerners succumb
to culture shock and dismiss what they see, Godlund sees common threads
in human nature. In East Africa, beads and the multiple symbolism they
embody especially attract her. Why beads?
"I heard that they were fertility
symbols," she told this writer. "Without fertility, the world wouldn't
go on. I also figured out that most rituals are about fertility. This is
common everywhere and when I paint it, it is not so much femininity. Fertility
is sort of a mild word for sexuality."
She has painted for over
four decades, and in that time, distilled the essence of her art. It is
rare to find a painter who takes you so close to your humanity. It is rare
too to find work so thoroughly realised that it seems that all the important
questions of form and substance, often so teething, have been answered.
Inside/Outside Africa
is a collection of work done over the past 10 years. Over these years,
she has worked on all media. In nature pictures, she attempts to capture
a storm or the sense that an old road is really old. The one canvas that
sticks in the mind is Cul-de-sac, a painting of a street in Kenya's
coastal town of Lamu, which made me feel the momentary fright of claustrophobia.
It shows windows and walls that seem to creak with age and the sense that
the world ahead is sealed. It depicts the ancient neighbourhoods of the
coastal towns of East Africa: wires cross overhead, hung with washing and
a solitary donkey nibbles at something in the gutter. Godlund saw this
on a visit to Lamu. But what she has painted is not entirely what the streets
of Lamu look like in reality.
The angles at which the streets
curve, and the narrow thoroughfares, created that sense of a dead end street
when she first saw it. She found out that it was not a dead-end, but that
split second moment when it appeared to be so, made the deception real.
And that is the strength of Godlund's art. Human perspectives may be whimsical,
dissembling and sometimes disastrous. But they exist and say a lot about
our inner world.
"It's not really reality,"
she says. "But more about what you saw."
