Home Amidst Elegant Company | Medium: mixed media painting | Techniques: pen, paint & paper cut on paper | Size: 30 x 42 cm | Production date: August 2017
drawing made for my children’s book for all ages.
Home is surrounded by Jizo spirits, lively Japanese O-Jizo-sama statues that one can find all around Japan alongside the road and on one’s way while travelling. The stone statues, also called ‘Earth treasuries’, resemble the compassionate bodhisattva and guardian deity Jizo Bosatsu. They are valued as protectors of children and travellers on their journey to enlightenment. I believe we all are children and travellers in this lifetime and beyond.
Homey here is being protected on his journey. Also, in this work you see him in the hills and hills, throughout history, are being sensed and interpreted as auspicious, energetically powerful places. O-Jizo-sama is found at boundaries between places both physical and spiritual, between here and there, between life and death.
Diana van der Harst is a multidisciplinary artist whose journey has resulted in the creation of an ever evolving Leftover Universe where Tender Time Sighs. While she has a focus on textile art, she also uses painting, drawing, ceramics, sculpture, photography and writing to seek and tell her story. Her creations originate from a meeting between inner and outer travels, from studying things up-close to things far away, from observing the small to observing the vast; a process of constantly shifting focus, a movement much like breathing. Tender Time Sighs; breathing life into a Leftover Universe, showing us traces of transformation and encounters with animate and inanimate beings. Drawing from her own experiences, inspired by life itself, characters have developed who share their meetings and findings along the way. Diana’s work is poetic, contemporary, intuitive, contemplative, intimate, emotional, whimsical, spiritual, narrative and embodies a magical realism.
Diana was born and raised in The Netherlands before she moved to Australia. It is in The Netherlands where Diana had her main art education and where she started exhibiting her works back in 2004. During a masterclass in textile design in The Netherlands in 2007 she was invited to exhibit her art in Tokyo, Japan. Since that exhibition she had 4 solo exhibitions and several work periods in Kyoto, Japan. Exhibiting for nearly 20 years now she showed her works in The Netherlands, Antwerp/Belgium, Melbourne, Perth, Tokyo and Kyoto/Japan. Diana is now focusing on her upcoming solo exhibition, during which she will be giving workshops as well as undertake an artist-in-residency. She is one of the participating artists in her community that opens up her home studio for the public to come and visit, an initiative that is held two weekends a year as part of an Art Trail. Several other projects are in development and she is open for commissions.
Email: leftoveruniverse@gmail.com | Website: http://www.leftoveruniverse.com | Instagram: dhyana_in_a_leftover_universe
Leftover Universe 