Between Heaven and Earth

Eti Gadish De Lange Without Any Load, the Moon Boat Sails to the Garden of Eden Dōka[7] The wooden boats Eti Gadish De Lange carves accompanied her as transitional objects in attending to and parting from her parents on their final journey. In her wanderings on the seashore, she collects what the sea emits – pieces of rusted steel, roots, and more – and infuses the sense of degradation and ephemerality they elicit into the soft wood. It is as if she is summoning a cruise beyond time in her boats, boats that safeguard memory. The boat motif as a symbol of the transition between the world of the living and the world of the dead is present in many ancient cultures. In Egyptian mythology, for example, the sun deity Ra sails in a boat, across the sky during the day, and through the underworld at night. In Greek mythology, the sailor Charon carries the souls of the dead to the river’s opposite bank, by ferry. In the work presented here, boats form a flotilla to the other side, which is hidden from our sight. The wave’s shape gives them momentum and they move together as a single entity before our eyes: They float through the air and disappear into the wall. The vision of the tiny trees planted in some of the boats, instead of sails, accords the aerial flotilla a modicum of absurdity as if they were on a quest for a new soil where they can put down roots, in their journey to a mysterious land. curated by Shir Meller Yamaguchi