$95.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover with jacket
320 pages with 32 duotone and 167 four-color photographs by the author, 7 drawings, and 1 color map
10.0″ x 11.875″ upright/portrait
ISBN: 978–1–938086–17–5
Published in July 2016
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized.
Published in association with the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston.
Events and Exhibitions
Saturday, April 6 at 11am
Artist talk
Through July 7, 2024
Exhibition
Appleton Museum of Art in Ocala, Florida
May 5-November 12, 2022
Exhibition and Opening Reception on May 5, 2022
Gregg Museum, Raleigh, NC
Lecture and Book Signing
September 9, 2017 at 2 p.m.
Belk Theater, India Festival
Charlotte, SC
by Martha A. Strawn
with introductions by Kapila Vatsyayan and Mark H. Sloan, an historical essay by William K. Mahony, and drawings by Jack Colling
An important and strikingly beautiful book about the sacred Hindu practice of threshold drawing!
In the Hindu world-view, threshold is a profoundly important concept that represents a passage between one space and place and another, creating a visual bridge between the secular and the sacred. Accordingly, the literal threshold a person crosses when entering and exiting a home or business symbolizes the threshold one crosses between the physical and spiritual realms of existence. Hindus have long believed it is possible to affect a person’s well-being by using diagrams to sanctify the “threshold space.” The diagrams do so by “trapping” ill will, evil, bad luck, or negative energy within their colorful and elaborate configurations, thereby cleansing those who traverse the space and sending them on their way with renewed spirit, positive energy, and good luck and fortune.
The creation of the threshold diagrams is steeped in Indian history and culture going back thousands of years. Practiced by women, it was long considered a vernacular art. But, as this pioneering book reveals, the diagrams represent highly sophisticated mathematical and cosmological underpinnings that have been handed down from one generation of women to the next. As India has modernized and rapidly become more urban, however, more Indian women have acquired more complicated lives, allowing less time to continue the practice of threshold drawing and relying, increasingly, on homogenized pattern books. And so a longstanding and critically important expression of Indian life, religion, and culture is becoming less common to the point the tradition is threatened.
Across the THRESHOLD of India reveals, the story of the threshold drawings for the first time, history of how the threshold drawings evolved, what they have meant and represent in Indian and Hindu culture, and how the practice became a high form of vernacular art for religious and everyday life. By combining her unforgettable photographs—most of which are in the permanent collection of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, the nation’s foremost research center for Indian culture and art—with the most recent scholarship on the history and art of the threshold drawings, Martha A. Strawn has given the world a unique and enduring gift. Her book is a work of visual ecology that perceptively portrays one of India’s and the world’s longest and least-known religious practices—the art of sanctifying space through the creation of threshold diagrams.
By presenting the most recent scholarship on the history and art of the threshold drawings and combining that engaging tale with her wonderful fine-art and documentary photographs, Martha Strawn has given the world a unique and enduring gift: a work of visual ecology that perceptively portrays one of India’s and the world’s longest and least-known religious practices: the art of sanctifying space through threshold drawings.
About
About the Author
Martha A. Strawn is Professor of Art Emerita at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte and a photographer based in North Carolina and Florida who is recognized worldwide for combining aesthetic and scientific inquiries into the study of place that she calls visual ecology. She co-founded The Light Factory Contemporary Museum of Photography and Film in Charlotte, and she has served on numerous boards throughout her career, including Friends of Photography and the Center for the Study of Place. She received a Fulbright Fellowship to India and also a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in photography. Her work is exhibited internationally in both art and science museums, among them the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Smithsonian Institution, Science Museum of Minnesota, San Diego Museum of Natural History, Princeton Art Museum, National Geographic Society Museum, Museum of Florida Artists, Mint Museum of Art, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, and Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Her books include Alligators, Prehistoric Presence in the American Landscape (1997) and, with Yi-Fu Tuan, Religion: From Place to Placelessness (2009).
About the Essayists
Kapila Vatsyayan is a renowned Indian scholar of classical Indian art, architecture, and dance and the founding Director and Chairperson of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. She is the author of many books, including The Indian Arts, Their Ideational Background and Principles of Form(2005),The Square and the Circle of the Indian Arts (2003), and Transmissions and Transformations: Learning through the Arts in Asia (2011).
Mark H. Sloan is Director and Senior Curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston and the author and co-author of ten books, including Force of Nature: Site Installations by Ten Japanese Artists (2007), Return to the Sea: Saltworks of Yamamoto Motoi (2012), and, with Roger Manley, Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Folk Art Environments (1997).
William K. Mahony is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religion and Chairman of the Religion Department at Davidson College, where he teaches courses on the religions of India. His books include The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination (1997) and Exquisite Love: Heart-Centered Reflections on the Narada Bhakti Sutra (2014).
Jack Colling is an artist currently based in Blairsville, Georgia. For fifty-nine years, he lived and worked in Central Florida, where he practiced the art of pen-and-ink drawing, specializing in nature, endangered species, and landscapes. His work is in numerous private collections and has been exhibited throughout Florida and Georgia.
Slide Show
An auspicious threshold diagram, Thirumazhisai village south of Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 1986. 
Passageway in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 1986. 
Creator’s Knot, a village street near Mysore, Karnataka, 1977. 
A river in southeastern India as viewed from a train, 2003. 
Shoes and a diagram, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, 1986. 
Sand bearers from the east bank of the Ganges River, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 1977. 
A stylized diagram derived from pattern books, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, 1986. 
Wash, in a village near Madurai, Tamil Nadu, 1998. 
Pulli kolam diagram, in a village near Bangalore, Karnataka, 1984. 
Cosmic diagram, Anandhi’s threshold on Vinayagam Street, R. A. Puram, Chennai, 1986. 
Skirts, in a village near Pipli, Orissa, 1986. 
Pongal diagram with tulsi leaves, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, 1986. 
Mickey Mouse representational diagram made for Pongal, in a village near Madurai, Tamil Nadu, 1998.
Praise
“Strawn presents a series of photographs and essays on the threshold designs used by women in India. Information for this book was gleaned directly from village women in India and Indian scholars. The photographs are the focus of the book and are divided into three portfolios: the first and second feature designs made with purely aesthetic intent, while the third is made up of figures that convey cultural information about Indian life. The essays, which bookend the portfolios, reference the photos in all three sections. Together, the portfolios and essays combine to create a visual ecology that attempts to convey the Indian worldview to the reader and viewer.”
—Protoview
“Martha Strawn’s photographs reveal an ancient tradition unfamiliar to most outside of India. The intricate patterns of the rangoli diagrams, rendered in lyric detail, connect these Hindu women with others throughout millennia who have sought to find the divine within sacred geometries. Strawn effectively demonstrates how this inherited custom has evolved from a religious necessity into a fascinating and enduring form of cultural expression. This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature about Indian art and culture, with Strawn’s timeless photographs at its center.”
—Mark H. Sloan, Director and Senior Curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, from his introduction
“It still astonishes me that no one has focused on this very important aspect of the Hindu religious experience. This beautiful and informative book will be a first in this area and one that will fill an important gap.”
— Vasudha Narayanan, Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of Florida, past President of the American Academy of Religion, and author of Hinduism
My Place
My place is a location inside me that has been assembled as various geographic locations throughout the world have impacted my existence. It is an amalgam of the places where I have lived for a long while or spent significant time. These experiences so shape my sense of place that I try to live fully from day to day, with the signatures of those places influencing my life in every way.
Assateague Island, off the coast of Maryland, is where I spent many days as a young person. When I was five and six years old, it was where my father took me hunting and fishing and where we searched for the remains of old ship wrecks, once finding a brass dinner bell and a brass ship’s compass in the sand dunes that constitute the eastern side of the island. We also watched the wild horses romp on the western side of the island and attended the annual “pony penning” roundup during which the wild horses were swum across the channel to Chincoteague Island, our “next-door neighbor” in Virginia.
My life in Florida after the age of six also centered on water and big sky. We lived in the town of Lake Wales. All year long we were in or on the waters of lakes with names such as Lake Wales, Weohyakapka, Rosalie, Okeechobee and hanging out as teenagers at the Camp Mack Fish Camp on Lake Kissimmee. The lakes and rivers in Florida are fed by springs bubbling up from the underground Floridan aquifer through the karst system of lime rock. Many of the rivers are tea-colored or “blackwater” rivers, which derive their color from leaf tannins staining the clear waters. Others flow from springs whose volume is so great that they remain crystal clear, such as the Ichetucknee and Crystal rivers.
Currently, I live on the Santa Fe River just to the north of High Springs, Florida, a “really great” town. The Santa Fe flows southwest above ground and underground through the lands just north of Gainesville until its waters mingle with those of the Suwannee River and continue to the Gulf of Mexico. Because the Santa Fe’s waters are fed by several major springs along its way, it sometimes is crystal clear and at other times it is tea-colored. The Santa Fe is always beautiful, with mysterious swallets swirling water back down into the aquifer and springs surging waters upward toward the surface. It provides excellent habitat for eagles, hawks, herons, limpkins, osprey, storks, swallowtails, woodpeckers, numerous other small-bird species, and water rats like my neighbors and me. Its waters abound with fish, turtles, snakes, and alligators. The shoreline features plants and trees of semi-tropical and upland forest varieties, but wild magnolia trees and crowning cypress trees are its hallmarks.
Before rediscovering my love for Florida along the Santa Fe River ten years ago, I found and lived for more than three decades in a glorious refuge of place in the countryside north of Davidson, North Carolina. I resided, worked, played, and loved in three nineteenth-century log structures that I renovated and assembled (with help!) on the land. The land there slopes sharply down to a creek. It is heavily wooded with beautiful beech trees interspersed with hickory, oaks, tulip poplars, and sourwood trees. Part of the rolling hills of the Piedmont, this land is augmented by outcroppings of large granite rocks, rivers and streams. The Town of Davidson is home to Davidson College and has the advantages of a small college town with a great coffee shop in between a marvelous bookstore and ice cream shop. Just opposite these establishments is the Town Green, where, on almost every weekend, there is some festival, concert, or fund-raiser for a worthy cause such as the Run for the Green, a marathon sponsored by the Davidson Lands Conservancy. Saturdays in Davidson feature the farmers’ market, specializing in local organically produced products.
These places have been “homes” where I have nested for deep periods of time. Others places have made significant impacts on my sense of place as well, but in short sprints of time by way of foreign travel. Time spent in Japan during the 1960s forever changed how I think about a sense of aesthetic as applied to all of life. Time spent in India since the 1970s has changed how I viewed humanity and how we benefit when we perceive each other from a broader perspective. With these layers of experiences, I have grown to feel that, ultimately, “my place” resides within and that it is not an external environment. Still, I love the beauty to be found in the people and plants and critters and places that surround us, for through place can be found a gateway, a threshold, to the inner soul where our “true” place resides and grows.
Copyright © 2013 Martha Strawn. All rights reserved.