Writings on the globe

Manpriya Singh 

At first, it’s little tough to assimilate the connection that artist, writer and film-maker Professor Gilah Yelin Hirsch is out to establish between different alphabets in any language of the world and forms already existing in nature. 

As the slides move pointing to the Y in English to, let’s say, an aleph in Hebrew to the branches of a tree forming a similar shape, it starts to fall in place. “Do we see because of what we think or do we think because of what we see. The writings are all there in the universe,” she shares during the course of the slide show, while visiting Chandigarh from California, courtesy Punjab Lalit Kala Akademi. 

The audio-visual presentation was followed by the screening of a 35-minute film, Reading the Landscape, that took a formidable amount of research and a visit to 25 countries to come into being. “I was asked to do something for children of all ages in the context of cosmography. It was in the year 2000 that the whole idea began to formulate,” she introduces the multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary, innovative, animated educational film. 

While cultures and languages bring unique richness and beauty to our world, we are more alike than different. And the alphabetic forms (no matter what the language) are shared.  It’s the same branches that make an X, or the streams that make a Y; the same alphabet also existing in the way a giraffe has been shaped. 

As for the art works, some of which appears to be abstract, is in fact, a world of cells, globes floating in cosmos, pods and flowers and skin all coming together. Because in the universal scheme of things, they all do! Innovative blending of science and art reveals existing relationships between forms in nature, forms in human physiology and the forms that are present in all alphabets. 

Currently a professor of art at California State University, she has been a pioneer of psychoneuroimmunology focusing on the power of art to heal. Something she can prove by a personal story, “It was in the June of 1999 that I met with an accident and the one resulted in broken ribs, knees, and broken everything.” The first battle was to get herself on the wheelchair. “After two months, I was able to work in my studio.” That’s when the Diamond series came into being, the artworks to do with constructing healthy body wherein, “I imagined myself giving open heart surgery…the works that reflect that I was holding energy in my heart.”  

manpriya@tribunemail.com