Digital yantra in Malmö in 2023
Digital yantra in Malmö in 2023
The illustrations presented in the exhibition are repetitions of an Indian traditional symbolic shape used for meditation, called a yantra. This specific one is called the Mahamrtyunjaya Yantra. There is a Dissonance between my current life in Malmö and my focus on Indian yantra - the creative process and the results are relevant to me, but foreign to my cultural context.
Being a designer and a yoga teacher, I have a personal relation to yantra: during a longer stay in a yoga ashram in India, I was given the task to draw several traditional yantra in vector-based computer programme Adobe Illustrator. Personally, drawing yantras is a way to combine two very important parts of my life: drawing and yoga. I have recently started to draw yantras again, now mainly in Adobe Fresco. Drawing the same yantra in different colour combinations is part meditation and part experimenting with the possibilities of digital illustration. Each new colour combination is made from scratch and the devanagari calligraphy, written by hand on iPad touchscreen.
Drawing yantra digitally is a balancing between the gesture of hand drawing and the perfection that can easily be achieved in a computer drawing programme, with straight and even lines, smooth colour gradients, etc. I have intentionally kept most of the handmade expression, as perfection is not the goal. The doing and the result are linked. Part of my reference is the yantras made with rice and lentils on the ground, or coloured sand on a circular plate. A similar philosophy can be found in the practice of Chinese calligraphy, or an idea expressed by the 20th century Swedish artist Karin Larsson: "Let the hand be seen".
The exhibition will show several printed yantras and an explanation of what is written in them.
Yantras are related to different cycles of time, and to gods. This specific one relates to the god Shiva. Mahamrtyunjaya is a name for Shiva and relates to death – as when one lunar cycle ends and a new one begins. However, yantra as meditation is not liked to religious aspects, but on how the shape itself relates to the parts of mind that go beyond intellect. The yantra is drawn with an intention of health, healing, and peace.
Meditation can be made on all that is experienced through the senses - form, light, sound, etc. Practitioners of yoga and meditation will know this kind of focusing - as will anyone who draws!
This is something I would normally share only with some people who already have a relationship with yantra – although this is a private kind of practice for me, I hope it will be of interest to a wider audience.
Special thanks to Sofia Lindgren Cortés and Studio Frid for hosting this exhibition.
