Bangkok...

So, well... yes.

Bangkok and I will meet again, after about twelve years apart. Last time I was a teenager, well cushioned from the city by the large group I traveled with. The accommodation, the transport, the activities were all planned by someone else. All I had to do was follow the crowd. It was a wonderful trip actually, I went with a group of WWII veterans, many of whom had been prisoners of war under the Japanese. We visited Hellfire Pass, wandered massive cemeteries of white military crosses, heard first hand stories from the men who had walked there in utterly different circumstances fifty years before. I was quite a random addition to the group. I didn't know anyone else on the trip and at the time I didn't know of any relatives of mine who had been a POW or even fought in the Asian Pacific campaigns. Later I realised I actually had several relatives who had fought there - not the least of which was my grandfather! When I got home my grandmother told me stories I had never heard before about men I had barely heard of, but who were her brothers, cousins, friends. Husband. I guess she had never before thought I'd be interested.

So anyway, Bangkok and I will meet again in exactly one week. This time I am on my own. I am glad to be going back as an adult, where I can choose to stay in less western hotels, eat less western food, and travel in less controlled (and possibly less comfortable) modes of transport.

I am planning to spent two weeks working with the elephants, and the rest of the time will be researching residencies, art universities, galleries, other elephant refuges... and hopefully a little time for a beach or two, a market or two and some mountainous vistas. I may not have access to the internet while with the elephants, but will try and keep the blog updated as much as possible.

wish me luck!

Chiang Mai and the Elephant Park

Here are some photos of the elephants and the park:

Elephant Nature Foundation

Click on this link to see a video by National Geographic about the elephants in Thailand and the elephant park I am going to go to...

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0510/feature5/video.html

The park was established by an amazing Thai woman, Sangduen "Lek" Chailert. Here is her story as taken from their website:

Sangduen "Lek" Chailert was born in 1962 in the small hill tribe village of Baan Lao, two hours north of Chiang Mai. Her love for elephants began when her grandfather, a traditional healer, received a baby elephant as payment for saving a man's life. Lek would spend many hours with her family's new friend, named Tongkum or Golden One, which would result in a passion that would shape the rest of her life.

Lek received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Chiang Mai University, and from there moved into working in the elephant tourist industry. While helping owners of trekking companies locate unemployed elephants, Lek quickly learned about the abuse and neglect that domestic Asian elephants experience.

With a love and respect for her country's national symbol and the knowledge that they were becoming endangered, Lek began advocating for the rights and welfare of Asian elephants in Thailand. In an industry that is steeped in its traditions, advocating for a change to the way domestic and wild Asian elephants are treated has not been an easy battle. But through hard work and determination her voice is beginning to be heard.

In addition to several documentaries about her work by National Geographic, Discovery, Animal Planet, and the BBC, Lek has also been honored to receive many awards. In 2005, Time Magazine named her a Hero of Asia for her work in conservation. The Ford Foundation in association with National Geographic named Lek a Hero of the Planet in 2001. Additionally, she has received two honorary degrees from Rajabaht Chiang Mai University; a PhD in Sustainability and Conservation in 2002, and a PhD in Veterinary Science in 2006. Finally, the National Geographic documentary Vanishing Giants, highlighting Lek's work with the Asian elephant, was recognized by the Humane Society of the United States with the Genesis Award in 2003.

In the coming years Lek hopes to bring her message about conservation and the humane treatment of Asian elephants to more people in and outside of Thailand. She will also continue to improve the lives of the rescued elephants living at Elephant Nature Park and provide emergency healthcare to elephants in remote villages throughout Thailand.

I went to friends birthday celebrations the other day and she asked us all to share something like a song or a poem, so i pulled out a couple of these to read. I guess it reminded me that it is good to share these things...

I wrote these, amongst others, leading up to the elephant show earlier this year. One of them was used for the show, some lines stolen from the end of it as the title and others as the byline for the show, it was printed in full in the catalog.



Part 1

She does not like this place
She knows it isn’t good
there is something wrong
she has known it for ages
Maybe she is sick
Maybe she is dying

She does not like this place
She knows there are other better places
She’s been there before
She can’t see them now though,
Because of all this mist
So maybe she is wrong
Maybe there is only mist

She does not like this place
She is sunk in smelly, thick goo
It covers almost all of her
Her skin is suffocating
Her nose is clogged with it
Her mind is submerged in it

She does not like this place
She thinks she can hear others
Ones who are somewhere else
But you can’t be sure of these things
Can’t trust your senses
Maybe it is all in your head

She does not like this place…
But at least she knows where she is
She is here, in the mud
With clogged skin and bad smells
Uncomfortable, but predictable; safe

‘I do not like this place’
she thinks to herself,
at last it is put in words.
Once she thought that
she was able to think this:
‘Then, maybe…
Maybe I should move’



Part 2

She steps tentatively down a strangely familiar path
From the edges of her eye she can see a glittering
Behind her a steaming bog, its mud stuck to her skin

She steps carefully through a mess of tangled vines
From the back of her nose she can smell a new thing
The stinking mud cracks, shrinks, itches on her skin

She walks on distracted by sounds almost unheard
Steps out onto sand, into sun and shivers in its heat
she shudders and dusty scabs of muck crumble away

She walks to that glittering, heaving mass of water
Tastes the sweet salt in the air, makes up her mind
The salt spray sticks to her skin, merges with mud

She struggles through waves, lifted, dragged backwards
Still she pushes forward til she is beyond their violence
Skin scoured almost clean by sandy, churned up water

Her legs not touching earth, but treading in vastness
The weight of her self has been taken up and carried
The last of the mud melts and is gently washed away

Now she remembers

Thailand

I have finally booked my tickets to go to Thailand~
March 2009 will see me working with elephants for a week or two and then traveling around looking at galleries, other elephant centres, universities etc.

As soon as I booked my flights I have had a renewal of energy and inspiration for the elephant theme. I have started envisioning new works, getting excited about what materials I will take on the trip to draw and paint while I am there. Thinking about gettting a really good camera so that I can take amazing shots. I can't wait!!!

What next? More elephants and... red balloons!

So the question I have been asked a lot since the show, and even during it... "What are you going to do next?"

The elephant based answer is that I am going to work hard at raising money, applying for grants and working a day job, in order to take a big trip next year. The most minimal level of adventure will be to go to Thailand and work at the Elephant Nature Foundation (there's a link to their site at the bottom of the page) for maybe a month and then come back and use the experience and material I've gained to be the basis of the next big elephant show.

I still feel connected to the subject matter and have a some more ideas that will potentially form the basis of a couple more shows.

The extended version of the trip (relying on funding and my capacity to come up with a satisfactory plan for the living arrangements of my cat) is to go to Thailand and do the volunteer work at the foundation and then go to India and Africa to visit some more elephants and cultures interested in elephants, and finally end up in America, where I would love to do a residency at the Women's Studio Workshop. They are an amazing residency program in the mountains of New York (State). They are a residency program focused on printmaking, paper making, book binding (and I think ceramics and sculpture). As the name implies they only accept women and you get a months worth of accommodation, unlimited printing press access, conversation and acquaintance with other women artists and basically an incredible experience. I'm pretty sure I would have pleanty of material to work with in that month after visiting Thailand, India and Africa!


However, in the mean time I am going to do something a bit different. In order not to get jaded with the elephant theme I think it is going to be important to do a few side projects as well. This year I am going to try curating a show or two and I also have an idea for another show planned for August, and its all about red balloons!

I was watching a performance at fortyfive downstairs called 'The Black Bag' and in it they sung a cover of the 1980's hit song 99 Red Balloons by the German band Nena. I had never really taken much notice of the song, it is quite boppy and fast paced, but the way the performer in this show sung it was slow and melancholy, which revealed the lyrics and made me pay attention to them for the first time...

99 Red Balloons

You and I in a little toy shop
buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
'Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base, bugs in the software
Flash the message, "Something's out there"
Floating in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by.

99 red balloons floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere red
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky
Where 99 red balloons go by.

99 Decision Street, 99 ministers meet
To worry, worry, super-scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war
The president is on the line
As 99 red balloons go by.

99 Knights of the air
ride super-high-tech jet fighters
Everyone's a Superhero
Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
As 99 red balloons go by.

99 dreams I have had
In every one a red balloon
It's all over and I'm standin' pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here...
And here is a red balloon
I think of you and let it go.

This song got stuck in my head for days, and with it some beautiful rich images of red balloons floating in a summer sky. So I thought I would have a show around that.

I love it as a comment on the folly of war and the ego so often responsible for it, not to mention the impact it has on regular people. But I also have come to see it on a more individual level as a kind of metaphor for the way relationships can flare up over nothing much and then you stand there with the ashes of a friendship or love affair after all the shots have been fired and hurt has been inflicted and there you stand, still alive, but all that was built up is destroyed...


Some thoughts:

Red the colour of passion, love, lust, blood, violence, danger and war. (The German lyrics did not specify that the balloons were red. A 'Luftballon' is a colorful toy balloon, rather than a balloon for transport or research. Kevin McAlea wrote the English version, titled "99 Red Balloons" on an envelope, which he claims to still have, which has a more satirical tone than the original. The English version is not a direct translation of the German but contains a somewhat different set of lyrics. The overall story and sentiment is the same though.)

Balloons, filled with air, usually breathed into by us, our own life force used to inflate them.

A Shakespearean quality to the folly, needless waste and tragedy. A joke, or playful moment gone terribly wrong.

City is civilisation, the slow build up of effort, industry, care and planning. Cities are the controlling and taming of the wild, a 'civilised' nation or person is one who is cultivated, educated, mature. It is logic, intelligence and control.

What goes wrong is random, a mistake, a misunderstanding. Chaos plays a hand. But the city is also destroyed by ego, war lust, carelessness, over-inflated fears and desire for domination over others... control gone out of control... and that dichotomous (and false) mindset of kill/die, destroy or be destroyed, control or be controlled.

Toy shop and balloons, are all innocence... it is almost an archetypal tale of a child learning the devastating power of their newly developed passions as they hit adolescence and emerge into adulthood.

Elephants and post-traumatic stress (Part 3)

From the same article (An Elephant Crackup? written by Andres Serrano for The New York Times) this tells of the work of the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, USA, a 2,700-acre rehabilitation center and retirement facility which has taken in many disturbed or old elephants, may of which have lived almost their entire lives in zoos or circuses. It tells of how they have been successful using human trauma recovery techniques with the elephants. It also begins to argue the logical conclusion to such realisations about the nature of elephant psychology... that is, that we can no longer deny our relationship and our responsibility to them.

"And yet just as we now understand that elephants hurt like us, we’re learning that they can heal like us as well. Indeed, Misty has become a testament to the Elephant Sanctuary’s signature ‘‘passive control’’ system, a therapy tailored in many ways along the lines of those used to treat human sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder. Passive control, as a sanctuary newsletter describes it, depends upon ‘‘knowledge of how elephants process information and respond to stress’’ as well as specific knowledge of each elephant’s past response to stress. Under this so-called nondominance system, there is no discipline, retaliation or withholding of food, water and treats, which are all common tactics of elephant trainers. Great pains are taken, meanwhile, to afford the elephants both a sense of safety and freedom of choice — two mainstays of human trauma therapy — as well as continual social interaction.

Upon her arrival at the Elephant Sanctuary, Misty seemed to sense straight off the different vibe of her new home. When Scott Blais of the sanctuary went to free Misty’s still-chained leg a mere day after she’d arrived, she stood peaceably by, practically offering her leg up to him. Over her many months of quarantine, meanwhile, with only humans acting as a kind of surrogate elephant family, she has consistently gone through the daily rigors of her tuberculosis treatments — involving two caretakers, a team of veterinarians and the use of a restraining chute in which harnesses are secured about her chest and tail — without any coaxing or pressure. ‘‘We’ll shower her with praise in the barn afterwards,’’ Buckley told me as Misty stood by, chomping on a mouthful of hay, ‘‘and she actually purrs with pleasure. The whole barn vibrates.’’

Of course, Misty’s road to recovery — when viewed in light of her history and that of all the other captive elephants, past and present — is as harrowing as it is heartening. She and the others have suffered, we now understand, not simply because of us, but because they are, by and large, us. If as recently as the end of the Vietnam War people were still balking at the idea that a soldier, for example, could be physically disabled by psychological harm — the idea, in other words, that the mind is not an entity apart from the body and therefore just as woundable as any limb — we now find ourselves having to make an equally profound and, for many, even more difficult leap: that a fellow creature as ostensibly unlike us in every way as an elephant is as precisely and intricately woundable as we are. And while such knowledge naturally places an added burden upon us, the keepers, that burden is now being greatly compounded by the fact that sudden violent outbursts like Misty’s can no longer be dismissed as the inevitable isolated revolts of a restless few against the constraints and abuses of captivity.

They have no future without us. The question we are now forced to grapple with is whether we would mind a future without them, among the more mindful creatures on this earth and, in many ways, the most devoted. Indeed, the manner of the elephants’ continued keeping, their restoration and conservation, both in civil confines and what’s left of wild ones, is now drawing the attention of everyone from naturalists to neuroscientists. Too much about elephants, in the end — their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous resilience — reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this revolt they’re currently staging against their own dismissal. And while our concern may ultimately be rooted in that most human of impulses — the preservation of our own self-image — the great paradox about this particular moment in our history with elephants is that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.

On a more immediate, practical level, as Gay Bradshaw sees it, this involves taking what has been learned about elephant society, psychology and emotion and inculcating that knowledge into the conservation schemes of researchers and park rangers. This includes doing things like expanding elephant habitat to what it used to be historically and avoiding the use of culling and translocations as conservation tools. ‘‘If we want elephants around,’’ Bradshaw told me, ‘‘then what we need to do is simple: learn how to live with elephants. In other words, in addition to conservation, we need to educate people how to live with wild animals like humans used to do, and to create conditions whereby people can live on their land and live with elephants without it being this life-and-death situation.’’

The other part of our newly emerging compact with elephants, however, is far more difficult to codify. It requires nothing less than a fundamental shift in the way we look at animals and, by extension, ourselves. It requires what Bradshaw somewhat whimsically refers to as a new ‘‘trans-species psyche,’’ a commitment to move beyond an anthropocentric frame of reference and, in effect, be elephants. Two years ago, Bradshaw wrote a paper for the journal Society and Animals, focusing on the work of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya, a sanctuary for orphaned and traumatized wild elephants — more or less the wilderness-based complement to Carol Buckley’s trauma therapy at the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. The trust’s human caregivers essentially serve as surrogate mothers to young orphan elephants, gradually restoring their psychological and emotional well being to the point at which they can be reintroduced into existing wild herds. The human ‘‘allomothers’’ stay by their adopted young orphans’ sides, even sleeping with them at night in stables. The caretakers make sure, however, to rotate from one elephant to the next so that the orphans grow fond of all the keepers. Otherwise an elephant would form such a strong bond with one keeper that whenever he or she was absent, that elephant would grieve as if over the loss of another family member, often becoming physically ill itself.

To date, the Sheldrick Trust has successfully rehabilitated more than 60 elephants and reintroduced them into wild herds. A number of them have periodically returned to the sanctuary with their own wild-born calves in order to reunite with their human allomothers and to introduce their offspring to what — out on this uncharted frontier of the new ‘‘trans-species psyche’’ — is now being recognized, at least by the elephants, it seems, as a whole new subspecies: the human allograndmother. ‘‘Traditionally, nature has served as a source of healing for humans,’’ Bradshaw told me. ‘‘Now humans can participate actively in the healing of both themselves and nonhuman animals. The trust and the sanctuary are the beginnings of a mutually benefiting interspecies culture.’’

Elephants and post-traumatic stress (Part 2)

Another section of the same article (An Elephant Crackup? written by Andres Serrano for The New York Times)

This describes the work and observations of a woman called Eve Abe, who saw a pronounced and very clear correlation between the behaviour of the traumatised young elephants and traumatised human children of war torn Uganda...

"Eve Abe... [is an] animal ethologist and wildlife-management consultant now based in London, Abe (pronounced AH-bay) grew up in northern Uganda. After several years of studying elephants in Queen Elizabeth National Park, where decades of poaching had drastically reduced the herds, Abe received her doctorate at Cambridge University in 1994 for work detailing the parallels she saw between the plight of Uganda’s orphaned male elephants and the young male orphans of her own people, the Acholi, whose families and villages have been decimated by years of civil war. It’s work she proudly proclaims to be not only ‘‘the ultimate act of anthropomorphism’’ but also what she was destined to do.

Abe began her studies in Queen Elizabeth National Park in 1982, as an undergraduate at Makerere University in Kampala, shortly after she and her family, who’d been living for years as refugees in Kenya to escape the brutal violence in Uganda under the dictatorship of Idi Amin, returned home in the wake of Amin’s ouster in 1979. Abe told me that when she first arrived at the park, there were fewer than 150 elephants remaining from an original population of nearly 4,000. The bulk of the decimation occurred during the war with Tanzania that led to Amin’s overthrow: soldiers from both armies grabbed all the ivory they could get their hands on — and did so with such cravenness that the word ‘‘poaching’’ seems woefully inadequate. ‘‘Normally when you say ‘poaching,’ ’’ Abe said, ‘‘you think of people shooting one or two and going off. But this was war. They’d just throw hand grenades at the elephants, bring whole families down and cut out the ivory. I call that mass destruction.’’

The last elephant survivors of Queen Elizabeth National Park, Abe said, never left one another’s side. They kept in a tight bunch, moving as one. Only one elderly female remained; Abe estimated her to be at least 62. It was this matriarch who first gathered the survivors together from their various hideouts on the park’s forested fringes and then led them back out as one group into open savanna. Until her death in the early 90’s, the old female held the group together, the population all the while slowly beginning to rebound. In her yet-to-be-completed memoir, ‘‘My Elephants and My People,’’ Abe writes of the prominence of the matriarch in Acholi society; she named the park’s matriarchal elephant savior Lady Irene, after her own mother. ‘‘It took that core group of survivors in the park about five or six years,’’ Abe told me, ‘‘before I started seeing whole new family units emerge and begin to split off and go their own way.’’

In 1986, Abe’s family was forced to flee the country again. Violence against Uganda’s people and elephants never completely abated after Amin’s regime collapsed, and it drastically worsened in the course of the full-fledged war that developed between government forces and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army. For years, that army’s leader, Joseph Kony, routinely ‘‘recruited’’ from Acholi villages, killing the parents of young males before their eyes, or sometimes having them do the killings themselves, before pressing them into service as child soldiers. The Lord’s Resistance Army has by now been largely defeated, but Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for numerous crimes against humanity, has hidden with what remains of his army in the mountains of Murchison Falls National Park, and more recently in Garamba National Park in northern Congo, where poaching by the Lord’s Resistance Army has continued to orphan more elephants.

‘‘I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants,’’ Abe told me. ‘‘I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the two. You know we used to have villages. We still don’t have villages. There are over 200 displaced-people’s camps in present-day northern Uganda. Everybody lives now within these camps, and there are no more elders. The elders were systematically eliminated. The first batch of elimination was during Amin’s time, and that set the stage for the later destruction of northern Uganda. We are among the lucky few, because my mom and dad managed to escape. But the families there are just broken. I know many of them. Displaced people are living in our home now. My mother said let them have it. All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed — no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after them. They don’t go to schools. They have no schools, no hospitals. No infrastructure. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It’s the same thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are wild, completely lost.’’

‘‘I remember when I first was working on my doctorate,’’ she said. ‘‘I mentioned that I was doing this parallel once to a prominent scientist in Kenya. He looked amazed. He said, ‘How come nobody has made this connection before?’ I told him because it hadn’t happened this way to anyone else’s tribe before. To me it’s something I see so clearly. Most people are scared of showing that kind of anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn’t sound like I’m inventing something. It’s there. People know it’s there. Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals.’’

For de Zulueta, the parallel that Abe draws between the plight of war orphans, human and elephant, is painfully apt, yet also provides some cause for hope, given the often startling capacity of both animals for recovery. She told me that one Ugandan war orphan she is currently treating lost all the members of his family except for two older brothers. Remarkably, one of those brothers, while serving in the Ugandan Army, rescued the younger sibling from the Lord’s Resistance Army; the older brother’s unit had captured the rebel battalion in which his younger brother had been forced to fight.

The two brothers eventually made their way to London, and for the past two years, the younger brother has been going through a gradual process of recovery in the care of Maudsley Hospital. Much of the rehabilitation, according to de Zulueta, especially in the early stages, relies on the basic human trauma therapy principles now being applied to elephants: providing decent living quarters, establishing a sense of safety and of attachment to a larger community and allowing freedom of choice. After that have come the more complex treatments tailored to the human brain’s particular cognitive capacities: things like reliving the original traumatic experience and being taught to modulate feelings through early detection of hyperarousal and through breathing techniques. And the healing of trauma, as de Zulueta describes it, turns out to have physical correlatives in the brain just as its wounding does.

‘‘What I say is, we find bypass,’’ she explained. ‘‘We bypass the wounded areas using various techniques. Some of the wounds are not healable. Their scars remain. But there is hope because the brain is an enormous computer, and you can learn to bypass its wounds by finding different methods of approaching life. Of course there may be moments when something happens and the old wound becomes unbearable. Still, people do recover. The boy I’ve been telling you about is 18 now, and he has survived very well in terms of his emotional health and capacities. He’s a lovely, lovely man. And he’s a poet. He writes beautiful poetry.’’

Elephants and post-traumatic stress (Part 1)

The following is an excerpt from an article called An Elephant Crackup? written by Andres Serrano for The New York Times.

It describes the consequences of poaching and controlled culling on elephant societies and argues that the psychological trauma suffered by the elephants is almost identical to that suffered by humans who are diagnosed with post traumatic stress or shock. What is particularly fascinating is that it appears that the same methods of treatment as used to treat us can also help elephants recover.


"[The] fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats. The number of older matriarchs and female caregivers (or ‘‘allomothers’’) had drastically fallen, as had the number of elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line. In parts of Zambia and Tanzania, a number of the elephant groups studied contained no adult females whatsoever. In Uganda, herds were often found to be ‘‘semipermanent aggregations,’’ as a paper written by Bradshaw describes them, with many females between the ages of 15 and 25 having no familial associations.

As a result of such social upheaval, calves are now being born to and raised by ever younger and inexperienced mothers. Young orphaned elephants, meanwhile, that have witnessed the death of a parent at the hands of poachers are coming of age in the absence of the support system that defines traditional elephant life. ‘‘The loss of elephant elders,’’ Bradshaw told me, ‘‘and the traumatic experience of witnessing the massacres of their family, impairs normal brain and behavior development in young elephants.’’

What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, ‘‘locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.’’

In fact, even the relatively few attempts that park officials have made to restore parts of the social fabric of elephant society have lent substance to the elephant-breakdown theory. When South African park rangers recently introduced a number of older bull elephants into several destabilized elephant herds in Pilanesburg and Addo, the wayward behavior — including unusually premature hormonal changes among the adolescent elephants — abated.

But according to Bradshaw and her colleagues, the various pieces of the elephant-trauma puzzle really come together at the level of neuroscience, or what might be called the physiology of psychology, by which scientists can now map the marred neuronal fields, snapped synaptic bridges and crooked chemical streams of an embattled psyche. Though most scientific knowledge of trauma is still understood through research on human subjects, neural studies of elephants are now under way. (The first functional M.R.I. scan of an elephant brain, taken this year, revealed, perhaps not surprisingly, a huge hippocampus, a seat of memory in the mammalian brain, as well as a prominent structure in the limbic system, which processes emotions.) Allan Schore, the U.C.L.A. psychologist and neuroscientist who for the past 15 years has focused his research on early human brain development and the negative impact of trauma on it, recently wrote two articles with Bradshaw on the stress-related neurobiological underpinnings of current abnormal elephant behavior.

‘‘We know that these mechanisms cut across species,’’ Schore told me. ‘‘In the first years of humans as well as elephants, development of the emotional brain is impacted by these attachment mechanisms, by the interaction that the infant has with the primary caregiver, especially the mother. When these early experiences go in a positive way, it leads to greater resilience in things like affect regulation, stress regulation, social communication and empathy. But when these early experiences go awry in cases of abuse and neglect, there is a literal thinning down of the essential circuits in the brain, especially in the emotion-processing areas.’’

For Bradshaw, these continuities between human and elephant brains resonate far outside the field of neuroscience. ‘‘Elephants are suffering and behaving in the same ways that we recognize in ourselves as a result of violence,’’ she told me. ‘‘It is entirely congruent with what we know about humans and other mammals. Except perhaps for a few specific features, brain organization and early development of elephants and humans are extremely similar. That’s not news. What is news is when you start asking, What does this mean beyond the science? How do we respond to the fact that we are causing other species like elephants to psychologically break down? In a way, it’s not so much a cognitive or imaginative leap anymore as it is a political one.’’

Daphne Sheldrick on Elephants

The following is an excerpt from an article I found in my various searchings of the net. It is written by a woman called Daphne Sheldrick, an incredible woman - the first person in the world to successfully hand rear newborn fully milk dependent African Elephant orphan.

For more information about this amazing woman go to: http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/html/about_daphne_sheldrick.html)

ELEPHANT EMOTION
By Daphne Sheldrick D.B.E.: 1992 UNEP Global 500 Laureate.

For the full text please go to:
http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/html/elephant_emotion.html


“Why is it that most people feel such empathy for Elephants, even if they have never had close contact with them?

Is it because of their size, their quaint characteristics, or the the fact that they are so incredibly endearing as babies, tripping over little wobbly trunks that seem to serve no useful purpose other than get in the way? Or is it, perhaps, because Elephants are "human" animals, encompassed by an invisible aura that reaches deep into the human soul in a mysterious and mystifying way.

Of course, Elephants share with us humans many traits - the same span of life, (three score years and ten, all being well) and they develop at a parallel pace so that at any given age a baby elephant duplicates its human counterpart, reaching adulthood at the age of twenty. Elephants also display many of the attributes of humans as well as some of the failings. They share with us a strong sense of family and death and they feel many of the same emotions. Each one is, of course, like us, a unique individual with its own unique personality. They can be happy or sad, volatile or placid. They display envy, jealousy, throw tantrums and are fiercely competitive, and they can develop hang-ups which are reflected in behaviour. They also have many additional attributes we humans lack; incredible long range infrasound, communicating in voices we never hear, such sophisticated hearing that even a footfall is heard far away, and, of course they have a memory that far surpasses ours and spans a lifetime. They grieve deeply for lost loved ones, even shedding tears and suffering depression. They have a sense of compassion that projects beyond their own kind and sometimes extends to others in distress. They help one another in adversity, miss an absent loved one, and when you know them really well, you can see that they even smile when having fun and are happy.

I have been privileged to live amongst elephants (and other animals too) all my life, observing them in a wild situation for over 30 years, and hand-rearing their orphaned young for just as long. But it has been the rearing of the infant milk dependent babies that has given me an in-depth insight into the elephant psyche…

… The saga of our orphans is an ongoing story that will undoubtedly outlive most of us, God willing. I like the words of Henry Beston, from "The Outmost House," and especially so since they were written in 1928, a period when all most people knew about animals, was how to kill them.

"We need another and wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals .... In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth"

Blind Men and Elephants

I think most people will be familiar with the ancient tale of the blind men and the elephant. I found this humorous variation online and thought I would share it...


Five Blind Men and an Elephant*

being by
Reverend Loveshade

Episkopos of the Discordian Division of the Ek-sen-triks CluborGuild who ripped it off from the Hindus/Jainists


* From the non-existent Apocrypha Discordia,
unauthorized companion to the Principia Discordia

(We realize that, in the era of the very late 20th Century as this is being written, the title and content of this story are politically incorrect. We apologize for any discomfort, but ask you to remember that the original story was created long before political correctness, and is not intended in any way to be offensive to elephants.)


One day five blind men, who knew nothing of elephants, went to examine one to find out what it was. Reaching out randomly, each touched it in a different spot. One man touched the side, one an ear, one a leg, one a tusk, and one the trunk. Each satisfied that he now knew the true nature of the beast, they all sat down to discuss it.

“We now know that the elephant is like a wall,” said the one who touched the side. “The evidence is conclusive.”

“I believe you are mistaken, sir," said the one who touched an ear. "The elephant is more like a large fan."

“You are both wrong,” said the leg man. “The creature is obviously like a tree.”

“A tree?” questioned the tusk toucher. “How can you mistake a spear for a tree?”

“What?” said the trunk feeler. “A spear is long and round, but anyone knows it doesn’t move. Couldn’t you feel the muscles? It’s definitely a type of snake! A blind man could see that!” said the fifth blind man.

The argument grew more heated, and finally escalated into a battle, for each of the five had followers. This became known as the Battle of the Five Armies (not to be mistaken for the one described by that Tolkien fellow).

However, before they could totally destroy themselves, a blind, self-declared Discordian oracle came along to see what all the fuss was about. While they were beating the crap out of each other, she examined the elephant. But instead of stopping after one feel, she touched the whole thing, including the tail, which felt like a rope. “It’s just a big animal with big sides, ears, feet, tusk teeth, nose and a skinny tail,” she thought. “What a bunch of fools these guys are.”

She then said “Stop! I have discovered the truth. I know who is right.”

She being an oracle and all, they stopped and listened and said “tell us!”

“I have examined the elephant with mine own two hands,” she said, “and I find that you are all right.”

“How can this be?” they asked. “Can an elephant be a wall and a fan and a tree and a spear and a snake?” And they were sorely confused.

She explained “the elephant is a great Tree, and on this tree grow leaves like great Fans to give most wondrous shade and fan the breeze. And the branches of this tree are like Spears to protect it. For this is the Tree of Creation and of Eternal Life, and the Great Serpent hangs still upon it.

“Unfortunately, it is hidden behind a great Wall, which is why it was not discovered until this very day. It cannot be reached by normal means.

“However I, in my wisdom, have discovered a Most Holy Rope, by which the wall may be climbed. And if one touches the tree in the proper manner which I alone know, you will gain Eternal Life.”

They all became highly interested in this, of course.

She then named an extremely high price for her services (Eternal Life doesn’t come cheap), and made quite a bundle.

Moral: Anyone can lead blind men to an elephant, but a Discordian can charge admission.

Paintings So Far...

These are some of the paintings I have done so far. Some of these will be in the show coming up in May... and some wont as they have already found good homes. There is still more work in progress that will emerge from the studio in time for the show as well!



They are all painted using oil paint, and many of them are on fine quality linen. I tend to stretch my own canvasses as I enjoy the process and find it helps me to connect with the surface so that when it comes time to paint we are not strangers.




It can take between one week to one year to complete a painting. Depending on how stuck I get with it. Some just need to sit half-finished for extended lengths of time before I feel confident to work on it again. Funny how a solid mental block of several weeks or months duration can lift silently in the night and be gone next time you are in the studio.

How did I get started on Elephants of all things?!?!?!

In 2006 I moved into a studio that was 'open plan'. This one was very open... It was basically a completely open warehouse, that is - I got one wall and my space was separated from other spaces simply by virtue of whatever furniture we happened to have... you know - desks, milk crates, piles of books, armchairs.

It was a great space, very cheap and had quite lovely light. As it was above a Buddhist centre I could imagine a whole lot of really great energy floating up to me from below. However the lack of walls and privacy was affecting my ability to work. I have always been quite sensitive and private about my work, especially when it is unfinished. So I was really struggling in this space.

It didn't help that the man in the space next to me was always there and hummed and sighed a lot when he worked. I spent as much of my energy while there struggling with myself over anxiety and inhibition as I did on thinking about the work... not a great way to be.

I was describing my dilemma to a friend and she asked a very pertinent question which I answered in what I thought was a flippant manner...

she asked: 'Did anything ever happen to you to make you so inhibited about working in front of other people?'

I said: 'Well there was that time when I was colouring in an elephant in a colouring book and got teased...'

she made me explain...

'Well, I guess I was about seven. We had gotten some free colouring books from some fast food place and were back home colouring in. I was going great guns on an elephant picture! I was shading and staying in the lines and taking so much care to get it right. I had soft gradations of tone and colour, a soft flush of pink in the ears... I finished it and was sooooo proud.

I can't remember who it was, maybe one of my brothers, maybe one of the neighbours, but one of them laughed at me and said in the mocking, know-all way that kids use to devastate each other, 'Elephants don't have pink ears!'

I think I contested that and we got into a fight and so Mum came to adjudicate. She said, 'I don't think elephants do have pink ears, maybe you were thinking of rabbits.' (I might point out that real rabbits do not have pink ears any more than real elephants do). At which point i burst into tears and was inconsolable. Mum tried to make it better by saying nice things like, 'You can colour them in any way you want, it is a drawing and you can make them purple if you want to.' It was no use, I hadn't been trying to be creative - I had stayed in the lines and shaded beautifully in the name of perfection - not imagination!!!!'

My friend heard this story and said simply, 'I think you should paint elephants for a while - especially in this open plan studio space - and paint its damned ears pink, paint the whole thing pink!'

And so I did.

And from there I fell in love with them. I fell in love with painting them, I fell in love with what they started to represent and how pertinent the symbolism of them seemed to be for me. (There will be more on that later)

So now within my art practice I have been painting and thinking almost exclusively about elephants for over a year now. In that time I have been having stalls at the artist's markets and have found an abundance of fellow elephant enthusiasts out there.