Monastery of Colour, by Johanna Bodzek

& Per Wedin (music)
The Theatre Gallery

Painting is a potentially shamanistic discipline. I know from my own experience the power of colour to express hidden feelings and secrets of a hidden consciousness. The Artist is dressed in white and she has paint brushes stuck in her hair as an Indian feather crown. She starts painting monochromatic, in yellow, in red etc. Papers are filled with colours and forms, expressing conflicting feelings of enthusiasm and mental distress in Art as a plastic medium. Expression is however not the destiny of emotions in this work. They are eventually to be dissolved in the sound scape created by the shaman musician as tiny drips of colour spread from the lid of the oil drum, where it has been poured, before the drum is hit by the stick. A white cube turns into a coloured space and the artist herself is a painted part of this new world.
I had a subtle feeling watching this, a warm peaceful wind reached for me from a secret landscape. So the next day, as I saw Johanna in front of the water at Ulva Kvarn, with a beautiful heaven and an archaic landscape in the far, it came to me that this was an image of my feeling while attending her performance. Happily Johanna confirmed that this was a part of the intention of their work. They wanted to bring the stillness of archaic nature into the gallery by their magic work. Thus I learned something about intention, quite different from my every day understanding of the term.