Kamakhya

Poetry/Visual Art
(Ekphrasis Project)
Usha Kishore and Carola Colley

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Buried in the blue
mountains, a stone lies
incarnadined, fecund.
It is I, goddess of passion,
primeval woman, raring to birth the world.
A lush labyrinth of triangles, decoding desire
in core mantra; a lotus energy shrine in bee-hive matrix;
my fluid spring, an ever fertile hum;  my mouth hungry,
devouring time.  I am the womb of the universe, in dark hues
of darkling bronze.  I am Kamakhya, flaming in camphor, adorned in
stars;  my breath, the living air.  Invoke me in word, whisper, thought and dream.
I shall appear in apparition and oracle, allegory and parable, rising in monsoon spate,
flooding the earth with my primal blood, staining the sky with visions of dark eternity.
My psychic song flows in your veins, carrying promises of verses to come.  I am infinite
soul spilling forth in countless forms, my endless female hungers wooing the heavens.  I am
laden cloud, twilight rain, water in its element; a ritual beyond time, bleeding in cosmic myth. 
 
 {Kamakhya is the presiding deity of the Kamakhya temple in Kamrup, Assam.  Translated from Assamese as the goddess of desire, Kamakhya is said to be a Tantric goddess, associated with Kali and Durga.} 

THREADS ACROSS WATERS   is a collaboration between the British artist Carola Colley and the Indian born British poet Usha Kishore.  This art project is Carola’s response to Usha’s poetry.  The project is a vibrant mixture of painting in oil and watercolour, mixed media print, sculpture and poetry.  This is the second collaborative project between Usha and Carola, both of whom share a fascination for myth, particularly in the exploration of female mythical figures and in the feminist interpretation of myth.  Both are also pre-occupied with cross-cultural aspects of myth, involving mythical characters and their transcultural avatars, whether Indian, Celtic, Norse, Graeco-Roman or Chinese.   The idea of weaving together aspects of the physical and metaphysical concepts run parallel in the works of both Usha and Carola.  
A joint exhibition is held at The Mill Gallery, Banbury, Oxfordshire (UK) from Tuesday 4th Oct to Tuesday 1st November 2016, with a poetry workshop and reading on the 15th of October. 

Usha Kishore 
Indian born Usha Kishore is a poet, editor and translator from the Sanskrit, resident on the Isle of Man, where she teaches English at Queen Elizabeth II High School.  Kishore has been anthologised by Macmillan, Hodder Wayland, Oxford University Press and Harper Collins among others.  Her work has appeared in international journals like Asia Literary Review, Index on Censorship, Indian Literature, Pirene’s Fountain, Poetry Salzburg Review, South Asian Ensemble, South Asian Review, The Stinging Fly and The Warwick Review.   Kishore’s recent prizes include the winner of the Exiled Writers Ink Poetry Competition, UK (2014), the Pre-Raphaelite Poetry Prize, UK (2013) and highly commended in the Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Competition, Ireland (2015, 2014 & 2013).  Her poetry has been part of international projects and features in the British Primary and Indian Middle School syllabi.  Winner of an Arts Council Award and a Culture Vannin Award, Kishore is the author of two poetry collections, On Manannan’s Isle and Night Sky between the Stars and a book of translation from the Sanskrit, Translations of the Divine Woman.  Currently Kishore is co-editing Home Thoughts, a British Indian diasporic poetry anthology with the Calcutta academic, Jaydeep Sarangi. 
www.ushakishore.co.uk  ​

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Carola Colley was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She completed a degree in sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art, and from there spent several years living and working in Portugal and Hungary before settling on the Isle of Man in 1993 . Carola ran a continuous program of workshops for children, adults and SEBD children from the studio while exhibiting widely. 
She currently divides her time between studios in Banbury and Portugal, working in a variety of media. Her work is inspired both by direct observation and the history of landscape, and by weaving in elements of myth, memory and poetry.

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