Tag: trekking

When big isn’t necessarily better

angela findlay4 Comments

Reflections on: IN PROCESS… a life, a film, a book, an exhibition, The Vaults, Stroud. Sunday 19th October, 11am-5pm and by appointment until 1st November.

 

“We must, we must, we must increase the bust.

The bigger the better, the tighter the sweater, the boys depend on us.”

I remember chanting that with my boarding school roommates as a teenager, elbows flung back in a futile attempt – in my case at least – to inflate our adolescent chests. Bigger was definitely better, or so we believed.

Burj Khalifa, Dubai

Skyscrapers, cars, salaries, houses… In so many areas of modern society, ‘big’ still equals ‘better.’ More followers, more likes, more headlines, more sales. The biggest countries led by the most powerful leaders and largest militaries make the most noise. And yet we know, quantity doesn’t equate to quality. Magnitude doesn’t always reflect meaning or value.

This idea – that bigger isn’t always better – is something I’ve seen reflected both in the trajectory of my great great aunt Joan’s life and in my own development as an artist. (If you are new to Joan’s story, please see my previous blogs for background.)

Patshull Hall, Staffordshire

Joan’s tent

Joan grew up in a 147-room stately home in Staffordshire. Yet she spent her final weeks in a single, often soggy Meade tent pitched in a remote Himalayan Valley, surrounded not by grandeur but by shepherds, wildflowers and the sound of rain. She had traded scale for purpose. And her joy, it seems, had grown as her material load had lessened.

My own artistic journey has followed a similarly inverse curve.

Painting a mural in Sydney, 1987

I began large, unable to contain any drawing or painting within the boundaries of paper or canvas. My work spilled onto walls, first private then public, then grew further to fill stage backdrops for theatres or touring bands. Various mishaps including a paint-splattered boss’s car and a disastrous commission to paint the backdrop for INXS KICK album tour in 1987, which promptly cracked and fell off in large chunks when rolled up, nudged me toward the more forgiving surface of prison walls. There, no amount of damage could make the environment worse than it already was.

The light danced, 120x120cm

Years later, I turned my focus to canvases of my own, their size dictated by the available studio space and commercial considerations of galleries. And most recently, to works just 28x28cm – or smaller. I have replaced the vast audiences of art fairs with the quiet intimacy of just six or seven visitors at a time into the two vaults beneath my home in Stroud’s Cemetery.

The Vaults

Those vaults now house In Process… a deeply personal exhibition about Joan, her life and the resonance her death still holds for me, our family and small communities she encountered in India.

In one vault, where gravediggers once hung their tools and I now hang mine, visitors watch a short film projected into the open lid of an old trunk telling the story of Joan Margaret Legge.

In the other, where those same workers drank tea, ghostly white plaster casts hang like three-dimensional botanical drawings reminiscent of the specimens Joan collected and sent to Kew Gardens.

‘138 days’

A series of square sketchbooks chart the 138 days I followed Joan’s 1939 diary entries. Starting on 17th February when I stepped into her shoes as she boarded a ship to India, I step out of them again on 4th July, the day she slipped off the edge of a Himalayan path to her death. One photograph, one sketchbook page, each day a quiet re-embodiment across time. Not a recreation of her journey, but a chance to listen more deeply to the changing tone of her voice in the final months of her life.

At the heart of the exhibition is its smallest piece: a re-working of a first edition of Frank Smythe’s Valley of Flowers, the very book that inspired Joan’s expedition. Through collage, drawings and pressed flowers, it now tells the stories of three visitors to the valley rather than just one: his, hers and mine. Wrapped in brown paper and tied with string like an archival package, the book invites visitors to wear white gloves to turn its delicate pages, not because it is precious in a monetary sense, but out of respect, Unlike most artworks, these ones are meant to be handled and engaged with.

‘Three journeys in one’

There is nothing for sale. No press campaign. No sponsorship. Just a quiet space, tucked away in a garden, found by invitation or chance. A strange but deliberate choice, and to me, a more authentic reflection of the humbleness of where Joan’s life ended than any traditional gallery could offer.

What Joan lost in material possessions, she gained in purpose and joy. Her life distilled into what nine porters could carry. She found a sense of completeness long before she had completed her journey.

That’s what I hope to convey in the improvised, immersive pieces shown in the warm belly of my limestone vaults. People forgive imperfection and lack of polish as they connect with Joan’s story through their hands, senses and bodies.

Just as artists learn to see not just form but negative space – the shapes between things – so Joan’s outwardly abundant life transformed into an inner world: slower, quieter, less visible, but not lesser in any way.

Maybe this is a natural outcome of ageing… the gentle decluttering of ambition and a reshuffling of values. Or maybe Joan’s story is a simple reminder that richness cannot always be seen and meaning doesn’t always require an audience.

The symmetry in our shrinking trajectories is just an observation.

But it feels strangely right.

IN PROCESS…

Sunday 19th October, 11am-5pm and by appointment until 1st November.

The Vaults, 114 Bisley Road, Stroud

 

 

 

Following Joan… Part Two

angela findlay1 Comment

(If you are joining Joan’s story now, you might like to read ‘Following Joan… Part One’ first)

‘Goal reached, Valley of Flowers. Fritillaries nodding their heads around me. Men off.’ 

On 20th June 1939, just over four months after leaving England, 54-year-old Joan and her troop of porters reached the Valley of Flowers in the northern Indian Himalayas. 

It was ‘a morning in a thousand’. Firs and jasmine scented the air, dew drops sparkled & everyone was cheerful & happy. The track wound up and down until it suddenly dropped sheer to the river. At the bottom, the worst native bridge Joan had encountered yet stretched precariously across a particularly turbulent section. ‘If I had met it in the early days I don’t think I could have faced it.’  

Then came a real climb, so steep she had to crawl part of the way. Even with ice axe and climbing boots, she couldn’t stay upright. The path clung to the side of a mountain which plummeted several hundred feet into the raging waters below, the ground crumbly and uncertain. But she pressed on. ‘One is so busy placing feet that one hasn’t time to think of possibilities.’ 

They slid down a precipice, hanging on to rhododendron bushes, crossed another snow field, then climbed again. Ganga Ram & Amba Dath – two of Joan’s three most loyal young guides – clearly thought she was too slow. ‘Each took a hand & ran me up paying no heed if I was on my feet or not. I had to beg for mercy twice as really they nearly finished me off,’ she wrote. And then they were there. The goal reached. The Valley of Flowers.

Tents were pitched exactly where mountaineer and author Frank Smythe had camped for several months in 1937. With three men managing the camp and plans to stay there until October, Joan was free to roam and explore the terrain of her new home in search of alpine flowers. The monsoon rains were gathering. Conditions would soon become unimaginably wet and the ground increasingly treacherous. But Joan was deeply happy.

July 2nd. ‘It was the most glorious evening, every way you looked magnificent, through the gorge range upon range of perfect mountains…’ The descent from these dizzying heights, however, was less glorious. Rains had rotted much of the ground and the final stretch was so steep that she had no choice but to descend on her seat, using the ice axe as a brake. Yet Joan revelled in challenge and beauty alike, undaunted by danger, enchanted by flowers and alive to every shifting shadow. ‘All the way back to camp I had the great joy of watching the last sun on the peaks across the river, orangey pink… the rest of the snow getting white & harder, then that green when they look so severe & unapproachable.‘

That night was lovely but cold. A bright moon rose over the range, catching the snowy summits in the east. Though Joan’s camp lay in darkness, the moonlight made the mountains glow. ‘A fairy world,’ she wrote, ‘beautiful beyond words.’

July 3rd. ‘The men started singing before 5 o’clock this morning, it sounded so nice. The ground has all dried up & things are extremely lovely. If we get spells of two days fine, it will be a great help. Everything is growing very fast.

The following day, Joan was dead.

©Staffordshire History Centre

As abruptly as her life ended, her diary – so alive with wonder – skids to a halt.

Silence.

A telegram or letter from the sub-postmaster in Joshimath informed her family. Joan had slipped, fallen and died instantly. Due to the remote terrain, her body was carried back to camp and preserved in the snow until a magistrate could formally record the death. When her sister, Dossy, requested that Joan be buried in the valley, a small grave was made. A year later a headstone was erected, apparently delivered by Dossy herself.

Except that last bit has been deemed most unlikely by Dossy’s grandchildren who can find no record of their grandmother having made the long, arduous journey to India in the first year of the Second World War.

Without Joan’s detailed voice to explain what happened, conflicting accounts have taken root, a Chinese whisper of history… herstory. Was she reaching for a flower to add to her collection of specimens for Kew Gardens? Did she just slip, the edge of the cliff invisible in dense fog? For several years, I’ve tried to disentangle fact from error and in late July 2024, I and three of Joan’s descendants travelled to Ghanghariya, a colourful, bustling shanty town of damp hotels, pilgrims and donkeys, ready to make the long climb into the Valley of Flowers. The landscape might not reveal the past, but it could not lie.

Ghanghariya

We were warmly welcomed at the impressive Information Centre, honoured guests of the great-great-grandchildren of shepherds, villagers, and guides from Joan’s time each eager to share their version of what had happened to ‘Legge Ma’am’. Soon I had scribbled five different endings to Joan’s life in my little green notebook, the one that would mysteriously vanish a few days later as if to tell me: it didn’t really matter. The only truth that did, was that Joan had not been forgotten.

The next day we set off, once again retracing Joan’s footsteps, traversing the same raging river (via a slightly less terrifying bridge) and climbing the steep slopes into the valley.

Low cloud concealed Joan’s snowy ‘majesties’ and even the valley itself. Flowers, shoulder high, lined the narrow trail until a small hand-painted sign forked it and directed us to the right.

‘Leggy Grave’ could not have been more remote. With the original, broken headstone having been generously replaced by Infinity Outdoor Explorers and the area lovingly tended by villagers, Joan rested, Ophelia-like, among geraniums, potentillas and flowers whose names I don’t know. But she did.

Buried under snow for eight months of the year, this was where my intrepid great-great aunt found peace. A ‘lost daughter of the Himalayas’. And in the prophetic words of the sub-postmaster written over eight decades ago, ‘though death is inevitable, her death in a lonely forest under the tragic circumstances will always be mourned.’

While Joan lives on in the hearts and imaginations of people in northern India – many of whom have trekked miles to pay their respects – back in England, her name, her journey and her collection of flowers had all but vanished into the obscurity of family attics and forgotten archives. She entered my orbit in my twenties, a bright star that inspired independence, courage, a different way to be a woman in the world. I’ve followed her willingly, right to the edge. Imagined her fall… falling… falling… time stretching to infinity like a bungee… then snapping.

A tragic death, or an enviable end to a life well-lived? I’ll let Joan speak for herself.

‘… if we would only give up struggling after worldly things. They don’t count much when you come face to face with what the old Sardou calls the sublimity of the Himalayas whose magnificence, serenity and everlastingness grip one right to the core. You will probably think I am mad, but I don’t think so. There are things that stand and are I think increased, they are love and gratitude.’

Joan, June 1939

Forthcoming Event:

At the end of September, you are warmly invited to an exhibition/series of events showing research and art created in honour of Joan. Exact dates and details to be confirmed, but it will be in the beautiful Chapels of Rest in Stroud Cemetery.

The ghosts of lost flowers

angela findlay6 Comments

On 4th July, while the minds and eyes of many people in Britain and further afield were firmly focused on Election Day, mine were occupied with my Great Great Aunt who died on this day 85 years ago. In one of those unintentionally magical examples of serendipity, I had managed to secure an appointment at Kew Gardens, London to view some of the fruits of her trekking and gathering in the Himalayas in 1939 just prior to her sudden death.

I introduced Joan Margaret Legge in a recent blog and talked a little on how, while the Second World War was rumbling towards its beginning, she had travelled to the Valley of Flowers, otherwise known as the Bhyundar Valley, in Northern India.

As a keen amateur botanist she had been inspired by the recent discovery of the valley in 1931 by a team of three lost British mountaineers returning from an ascent of Mount Kamet and seeking shelter from inclement weather. One of the climbers, Frank S. Smythe, had been so entranced by the valley that he returned in the monsoons of 1937 to explore and collect examples of its flora. His book, published in 1938, was the inspiration for my great great aunt to set sail in February 1939 and travel up through India to her base camp in the lower hills around Ranikhet. Waiting there for the snows higher up to melt, she spent two months acclimatising, doing practice hikes and organising porters and equipment for the big trek to her destination where she planned to spend the summer gathering seeds and samples for Kew.

Between 22nd May and 20th June she trekked north sleeping in precariously pitched tents with a hardy team of local men carrying provisions. Usually on her feet but sometimes on her bottom, she scrambled and climbed her solitary way through the mountains in a state of sweaty or rain-drenched awe of the ‘Glories’ as she called the soaring peaks that emerged and disappeared in the sky. She took cameras, presses supplied by Kew, wrote diaries and filled collectors’ notebooks with minuscule handwriting describing calyxes and tuberous roots while always scanning the terrain for flowers to press and send to the Herbarium in the hope of filling some of the gaps in Smythe’s earlier, spoiled-by-mould attempts to record what grew there. 

On my first visit to Kew in 2022 I had been told that none of her notebooks or specimens could be located, that they had probably not survived or had been of insufficient quality or significance. It was impossible to search for them… understandably so, the Herbarium houses an incredible seven million specimens!  

The Herbarium at Kew, founded in 1852

When I research I sometimes get this dogged instinct not to accept the first claim of something no longer existing or being lost in the annals of some past archival system and, not quite ready to give up, I renewed my quest to locate them. Following a string of helpful leads, several kind employees at the Herbarium, intrigued by my aunt’s story, joined me in my search. They soon discovered that a collector’s notebook and an as-yet unknown quantity of her specimens had indeed survived and the latter had been recently digitalised as part of a huge project to create a digital catalogue of the contents of Kew’s filing cabinets.

Digitalised specimens of Joan Margaret Legge ©Kew Gardens

And so, on the anniversary of Joan’s death, dodging ballot papers and predictive polls, I immersed myself in the sepia papers of a time and world that no longer exists.

Joan’s Collector’s Notebook, 1939  ©Kew Gardens

Exhumed from their graves and held in place by tiny straps, I was able to connect to Joan through the physical ghosts of the plants she had harvested. Traces of earth still clung to their roots, potent yellow pollen spilled from crumpled and flattened flowers, residual colours blushed petals and leaves as their ethereal beauty gently concertinaed the 85-year stretch of time between Joan’s picking and my viewing into a space in which I could almost touch her. 

Strange to think that these faded blooms had made it back to England while she hadn’t… It was a poignant preamble to an impending trip with my sister and two first cousins, all female descendants of Joan, designed to follow in her footsteps through the monsoon rains and soaring peaks of Uttarakhand, from Ranikhet to Joshimath and Badrinath and on to her isolated grave in the Valley of Flowers. As far as I know, we will be the first members of her family to visit Joan. It will be the realisation of a dying wish of my dear uncle who had long wanted to travel there himself but, unable to fulfil his dream, invited us to go there in his place.

Time marches on, history is made. We have a new prime minister and his government’s actions and inactions will make it into the newspapers and history books. Meanwhile, the silent and unseen reside as untold stories pressed between their pages awaiting discovery.

All images are © copyright of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and/or The Herbarium Catalogue, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Published on the Internet http://www.kew.org/herbcat [accessed on 04/07/2024]