Victoria's peaks inspire pioneer Hilda

Victoria's peaks inspire pioneer Hilda

By Astri Wright

VICTORIA, Canada (JP): Hilda Soemantri holds a long list of
"firsts".

One is that she is the first Asian scholar to be Orion Program
Artist-in-Residence, an exchange program at the Faculty of Fine
Arts at the University of Victoria.

It is the second time in two years that Hilda has spent the
spring semester in the province dubbed "Beautiful British
Columbia". This time, with only one course to teach, she is freer
to concentrate on her own raku clay sculpture.

With its salmon-packed rivers, snow-capped mountains and once
dense forests, now gradually disappearing into the world's paper
and saw mills, the environment is still very different than the
metropolitan urban setting of Hilda's native Jakarta.

At home, she is best known as a senior faculty member and
contributing artist at the Jakarta Art Institute.

With the distinction of being the first Indonesian woman
sculptor to have a solo exhibition of her work (1978), it is
possible she is also the first woman artist in the history of
modern Indonesian art to exhibit her work solo.

This distinction is all the more remarkable when one thinks
how rare a medium ceramic sculpture is compared with painting. An
awareness of clay as an aesthetic medium and not just a
functional one is in its very infancy in Indonesia, where the
appreciation of oil painting began in the early 20th century.

She is also the first Indonesian woman to hold a doctorate in
art history, obtained from Cornell University.

Hilda's dissertation on the ceramics of the former Majapahit
kingdom in Java has just been published in Indonesia. And, as of
April 3 this year, Hilda made art history as the first modern
Indonesian artist known to have a solo exhibition in Canada.

The event follows the groundbreaking introduction of
contemporary Asian art to Canada with the Traditions/Tensions
exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in April 1996.

Here, American and Canadian art audiences became acquainted
with the work of five Indonesian artists: Dadang Christanto, Heri
Dono, Nindityo Adipurnomo, F.X. Harsono and Arahmaiani. These all
belong to the younger generation of artists who have adopted
installation as their main medium since the early 1990s.

Rhythm

American curators have yet to embrace the historical and more
broadly representative presentation of modern Indonesian art
attempted by the Festival of Indonesia curators in 1990-1991.

Hilda's art represents a pure sculptural tradition steeped in
the sensibilities of a more senior generation of artists, whose
work continues to change according to her own rhythm and not
according to ephemeral art world fashions.

While a few group presentations of modern Indonesian art have
been held in North America in the last nine years, it appears
Hilda is the first Indonesian during this time to have a solo
exhibition on the continent.

In 1990, the Affandi exhibition was in Washington, D.C., and
several exhibitions by Sudjana Kerton in the New York and
Connecticut area were in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like Affandi and Sudjana, Hilda's show from March 26 to April
3 had works inspired by both her native and foreign perspectives.

Hilda, Indonesia's first professional and foremost ceramic
artist, works in raku clay and glazes combined with mixed media.

She exhibited work created in Victoria in the Maltwood Art
Museum and Gallery at the University of Victoria.

While her work from the 1970s and 1980s was abstract and
conceptual, work created in the few previous months shows several
important departures. It is more narrative, less abstract and
incorporates other media than clay.

Inspired by the physical reality of snowy mountain ranges of
the West Coast married to the symbolic, spiritual meaning of
mountains in Indonesia, Hilda also incorporates handmade fibers
and branches of the arbutus tree into some of the works.

Coming from a metropolis of 10 million people, this is the
first time nature was such a prevalent theme in her work.

"Actually, you were the one who pointed out to me the beauty
of the arbutus tree's twigs," Hilda told me.

"I use them here not so much as a marker of a specific place,
but more for their formal qualities."

Flat slabs of porous, grainy raku clay in various organic
shapes lay or hang in the center of the gallery. The slabs are
orchestrations of earthen, smoky nuances alternating with rainbow
irridescence.

The clay had been fired in earthen pits with burning hay. The
firing had turned the glazed and unglazed clay surfaces into
matte and shiny patterns, smoke and fire teasing out the hidden
colors of different mineral solutions in ways that the artist can
only partly envision beforehand and control during the process.

Each slab is shaped in such a way as to be neither geometric
nor amorphous, with echoes of both types.

Roundish or oval-like, squarish or rectangle-like, each piece
is set against a plaque of grainy, stained wood or handmade,
roughly textured paper.

The clay surface has been pieced, cut into, layered or folded
back while wet, the fired product retaining the memory of moist
plasticity and the interaction between human hand and liquid
soil.

Mountains

Seven of the 15 pieces exhibited were named Gunungan (Cosmic
Mountain). These pieces are less abstract than the others,
hovering between relief sculpture and clay paintings of
landscapes.

These depict the outlines of mountain ranges, with peaks
rising over sleekly descending angles, one behind the next. In
the small space of a few square inches of clay, the impression of
vast distances of wilderness of a sky is conveyed.

In Gunungan I, the blue outline of the glazed clay peak is
continued into the background, where blue handmade paper creates
the rest of the mountain against white paper.

"One thing that impressed me about Victoria was the mountains,
they are very impressive, visible across the waters. I didn't
grow up with an awareness of mountains -- Jakarta is so busy,
many tall buildings, so much pollution," Hilda said. "You have to
go out into the Bogor area to see the mountains."

"I think there is a difference between the mountains here and
the mountains in Indonesia. Here, I was impressed with the real
forms of the mountains, but in Indonesia, it is more the symbolic
nature of the mountains that impresses me," she said.

"Somehow I cannot put the two together, the real and the
symbolic, though in my work they are mixed."

Hilda's works of 1998 are neither real portraits of mountains
nor completely symbolic ones. "That's why I named them 'Cosmic
Mountains'," the artist said.

While the works she created in Victoria in 1996 (exhibited in
Jakarta in December 1997) all had titles like Postcard from
Victoria, the recent works marked a step towards a more universal
aesthetic statement, in this sense linking her earlier abstract
work.

With this exhibition, Hilda demonstrated once again that her
relationship with clay is a direct and intimate one for her, not
muddled by intellectual processes until the work is nearly done.

In contrast to many others in the post-conceptual era of art,
this artist never starts with an idea of what she wants to make.

She lets the feel of the clay, the physical act of working it
soft, and the particular texture of the moment in time determine
its shape. Only afterwards do her thoughts enter into the
process, particularly at the point of naming the piece.

Hilda's ceramic sculpture of the last two years shows a
maturity of artistic vision already present in her earlier work.

What is new, compared to her work of the 1980s, is the higher
degree of exquisite sensuality in textures and form, a far
greater complexity in composition and idea, and a willingness to
be more narrative.

The stringent, purist simplicity of earlier work has yielded
to a controlled richness in dialogue between many layers of clay
and glaze, and between clay and other materials.

The incorporation of paper and wood constitutes a new
inclusiveness: in addition to earth processed by fire, more
natural elements are present.

While Hilda's use of gold leaf is not new in her work, here it
is no longer hidden in dry cracks of clay. It is used in greater
abundance, as rich, abundant rectangular fields or as golden
skies.

With the image of the mountain, the delicate framing, the use
of soft and more ephemeral materials (like the batik slendang
draped through one pieces) along with hard, more lasting ones,
Hilda's recent work incorporates philosophical dimensions that
are both universally contemporary as well as complementary to
ancient Javanese traditions.

In short, her present work evokes a new and richer world of
identity, pleasure and mastery of formal elements that embraces
experimentation. Her work has achieved the tension of
simultaneous arrival and departure, where pure abstraction and
narrative concept keep each other in perfect balance.