Building Bridges

(Over Hundreds of Rivers)
Someday soon
We will meet again
Glacier water
Stay pure and clean
A river is flowing
A hundred rivers are flowing
Crossing the boarders
Like water,
Travel along rivers
We can hear our hearts beating calmly
A bridge of peace is open
A hundred bridges to the land of peace
Cross a bridge of peace
To reunite with love and peace
Dreams come true

This exhibition, ‘Building Bridges', showed works inspired by the last nine years [2005 – 2014] of Tomoyo Ihaya’s travels for artistic research in Ladakh. One of the main themes of her research was rituals around water and daily chores such as fetching water.
“By witnessing how people live with water, an essential of life, I wanted to express how people live and what life is all about. During my trips, I encountered numerous rivers in the fields and mountains and crossed numerous bridges. In the remote areas, bridges were the only means to reach a community on the other side of a wide river. Whenever I crossed a bridge (metal, wooden, concrete, worn or new), both the bridge and the crossing came to hold symbolic meaning for me. A bridge connects, and crossing a bridge suggests crossing to the other side of life.”
For many years, Tomoyo has also thought about how art can help to create peace in this troubled world of ours. Ladakh is a place where she has been coming repeatedly over the last nine years, and through these trips she has learnt from the people about a way of life and spiritual values that exist in the extraordinary natural environment.
Thus, in addition to her drawings and installations, she decided to ask like-minded friends near and far to contribute crocheted and knitted strings that embody wishes of peace and love to assemble a symbolic bridge. During the exhibition, visitors were invited to sit and knit a string to add to the bridge.
She hopes the bridges and her work resonate with this ancient land of Ladakh, and spread contemporary art through community-based projects and enrich local culture.
Tomoyo Ihaya’s arts residency and exhibition at LAMO were supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.