To the Roof of the World

I arrived in Lhasa in October, when the air is thin and cold and the light falls sideways across the Potala. Nothing prepares you for the altitude — not the reading, not the warnings. The body simply slows, and in that slowing, something opens. I had come to draw. I stayed to listen.

The plateau is not empty. It only appears that way from a distance. Up close, it is full of a particular kind of attention — the attention of people who have learned to live with very little between themselves and the sky.

I began collecting on the second trip. Not souvenirs — the land's own leavings. Bones bleached white by altitude sun. Fragments of fiber caught on thorn scrub. Stones worn smooth by rivers that no longer ran. These became the vocabulary of the work that followed: the weavings, the assemblages, the drawings made from memory in the months after returning.

There is a Tibetan word, 'lungta,' meaning wind horse — the energy carried on the breath of the wind. I think of it often when I work. The materials carry something of where they came from.

The Faces

I drew whenever I could sit still long enough. In tea houses, in monastery courtyards, at the edges of markets. The Tibetan face is extraordinary — weathered by altitude and wind into something that looks ancient even in the young. People were patient with me, or curious, or simply indifferent in the way of people who have more important things to attend to.

Those drawings became the Faces of Tibet series. They are not portraits in the formal sense. They are records of a kind of looking — the looking that happens when you are a stranger trying to understand something that cannot be explained.

The hardest part of returning was the noise. Not just sound — the noise of abundance, of speed, of surfaces. It took months before I could work again. When I finally could, the materials from Tibet were waiting on my studio table, and the work that came out of that reunion was different from anything I had made before.

I have been back four times now. Each journey asks a different question. I am still working on the answers.