Near to Heaven
By David Young, The NZ Listener
July 29, 1995
Few Westerners have got as close to the Dalai Lama as New Zealand sculptor and photographer Hamish Horsley. Horsley, who has acted as an imposing but genial bodyguard for the Tibetan leader during several of his recent British tours, has also measured His Holiness’s head with callipers during a sitting for a portrait sculpture.
“It was six in the morning. He was quite withdrawn,” says Horsley. “But he giggled when I measured his nose. It felt quite strange to be that close. He seemed so vulnerable and I got a sense of the emotional burden he must carry.”
The exiled spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet has been based at the edge of the Himalayas at Dharamsala, India, for decades. Six million Tibetans remain in Tibet, which China has ruthlessly controlled since 1959, and some seven million Chinese colonials now also live there.
Horsley, 44, has been based in London for much of the last 20 years, but over the last eight years he has developed a deepening relationship with Tibet and the Tibetans. He has gone regularly to the Himalayas and often deep into Tibet.
As we fly from Delhi across the rumpled mountain wedge between Afghanistan and old Tibet, heading for the ancient kingdom of Lhadak, in northern-most India, the endless ridges, peaks, glaciers and valleys excite and unsettle Horsley. He identifies several distinctive mountains, including the mystical Mt Kailash on the far-off horizon. “I’m hoping to get back there soon,” he says.
Horsley’s relationship with this landscape and its hardy, bright-eyed people really began in the early 1970’s, when, for two years, he was a novice monk in an ashram in Rishikesh, besides the Ganges in the Himalayan foothills. But not until he graduated in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 1986 did he begin to see the potential it held for him in developing his work. “I had been working essentially with the landscape, experimental earthworks and stone placements. I wanted to explore the idea of objects having a sense of place in relation to wilderness and was a bit unsure of where to go. My professor [sculptor Philip King] suggested I take a wander there.”
That “wander” has never ceased. It has taken him to the heart of nomadic Mongolia in mid-winter, through Turkistan along the silk road, to much of Tibet and now, Lhadak.
Until 20 years ago Lhadak was an isolated kingdom closed to outsiders by the Indian Government. Today it is a remnant of a world that has almost gone, a place where, despite the effects of the quite recent connecting road and flickering Hindi television, Tibetan culture still exists, little changed over a thousand years.
The central town, Leh, sits in a valley cut by the Indus at 3700m. In winter, night temperatures of -30C rime outer walls; by day, blistering sunshine burns the skin. So barren and formidable is the landscape that human occupation of it seems perplexing and mysterious. Yet the stone monasteries are there, soaring high on usually sheer ridges, seemingly integral to the mountain. It is as if the Tibetan Buddhists set the foundations of their monasteries as near to heaven as possible.
“There is a very curious link between the people and the land that I can’t get away from,” Horsley says. “The beauty of the landscape can be quite overwhelming, but the Tibetans, often very poor and living with considerable hardship, exist easily within it. They never seem awestruck. It is their home, their spiritual home.
“At first I’d intended going to some sort of remote areas where human input is so minimal, just to travel through it, really, in search of ideas and images, which I could then work up into drawings. “Yet, even in the wildest parts of western Tibet, when you get there, there is this unfathomable relationship. There is such a strong sense of… [he takes an unusual pause]…just space. And that culture – powerful, bizarre almost, a refined metaphysical and deeply compassionate faith coming out of such a barren, hard country.”
So he began to take pictures. “The photographs were to capture the landscape – as a way of me recording it – but it soon became more than that. Photography became an integral part of my work. It is a profoundly beautiful landscape and, for me, very seductive. The influence it has had on me and my work is immense.
“Curiously, people in the West think of Tibet as a small mountain kingdom, with a God King and covered in snow. But it’s vast, as big as Europe, and most of the country has very little snow – it’s too dry. There are also grasslands that seem to stretch for ever, with great herds of Yak – and wild flowers, and, in the east, dense forests of juniper [now being massively deforested by the Chinese]. “And mixed in with all that are these extraordinary places, great monasteries and places of insight and learning, though tragically, most are now in ruins.”
Horsley’s first visit to Tibet was in 1987; he reached the Chinese-Tibetan border just as the [October 87] Tibetan uprising occurred. “For a while [my visit] looked a bit impossible, as the Chinese weren’t letting anyone through. But I did manage to get to Lhasa eventually and spend some time there. What I encountered was shattering - an invading army brutally at war with people in their own country. It was sticks and stones against machine guns. The courage and faith of those Tibetans was something I can never forget.”
Back in London, he made contact with the Tibet Foundation, an organisation run by Tibetan exiles to promote their culture. The Dalai Lama was about to visit the UK and they needed help with security. “I volunteered without realising it would lead to so many other things, such as the portrait bust, and, in time, an immense amount of photographic work.”
Although Horsley is not a committed Buddhist, his early days at Rishikesh and his continuing days at the Tibet Foundation have made him knowledgeable about Eastern Philosophy. “I have a huge respect for Tibetan Buddhism and I’m moving closer and closer to it – a lot of their rituals and customs aren’t foreign to me anymore.”
In the foothills of the Himalayas we visit the monasteries of Thuksi, Hemis and Spituk . At Spituk, overlooking the Indus River and the Indian military bases that provide the yang to the monasteries’ yin in Lhadak, Horsley spends most of the day photographing an annual festival performed by masked and costumed monks.
At Hemis Monastery, at an altitude of about 4000m, most of the inhabitants have gone for the winter. The drumming accompaniment and murmured chant of a solitary monk in the dark recesses of the 350-year-old temple float out into the courtyard. Inside, there are butter lamps and burning candles that light up walls of painting, Tibetan manuscripts, Buddha figures and, incongruously, a Nescafe tin.
These monasteries, tucked deep into the valleys around Lhadak, represent a vital link with the past, more critical as Tibet is purged of its spiritual leaders and practises.
Horsley’s relationship with the Tibetans, their religion and their political cause, serves them well. Tibet, a Living Culture, a large exhibition that he has curated for the Tibet Foundation, features many of his own photographs. Shown in London, Dublin, Barcelona and Helsinki, it brought home to a large audience the plight of the Tibetans, and the richness of their culture.
“The Foundation aims to raise awareness and to find ways of getting aid to Tibetans inside Tibet,” says Horsley. “Their situation is appalling. Chinese persecution and immigration as worse than ever. Young Tibetans, often barely in their teens, are seeking exile in ever greater numbers. They are swamping the reception camps in Nepal and India and straining to breaking point the resources of the Tibetan-run schools that must provide for them.
“The cruel irony is that Western governments do know of the Tibetans’ plight and their right to self-determination, but are too concerned with Chinese trade to make an issue of it.”