Katarina Weslien has been interested in India’s spiritual culture for more than 40 years. She has traveled to India from Maine, or wherever she was living, as an artist, teacher, pilgrim and, most simply and humbly, as an observer.

Over a lifetime of travels, she has learned to listen with her eyeballs, as she likes to say.

“Especially when you travel, it’s an opportunity to be like a 3-year-old. You have to make sense of things, but you don’t have a language, so you rely on your senses,” said Weslien, 68, who grew up in Sweden, came to the United States as a young girl and now lives on Peaks Island in Portland in her retirement from working as an educator at Maine College of Art and other institutions.

This spring at Speedwell Projects in Portland, the multi-disciplinary artist is showing three long-term projects that begin and end with the Ganges River in India and its sources in Tibet. “What Did You Smell When You Were Away?” opens Friday and is on view through July 10. Each distinct element of the exhibition represents a different art project based on her travels to pilgrimage sites, each expressed in a different medium and all involving water.

The most impressive – physically, in terms of color and general awe – are six-large scale Jacquard tapestries based on Weslien’s photographs of the temporary fabric shelters constructed at the largest gathering of humanity in the world, the Kumbh Mela, where somewhere between 50 million and 100 million people come together over six weeks every 12 years to bathe in the confluence of the Ganges and Yumuna rivers, where they believe all sins are washed away.

These temporary structures have a circus-tent quality to them – short-term megacities that are erected like architecture along the riverbank, used for specific purposes, then taken down, rolled up and carted away until the next time. Weslien has attended twice, most recently in 2013. She amassed photographic images of the empty tents, focusing her attention not on the millions of seekers who made the pilgrimage but on the ephemeral cloth cities constructed to house and nourish the pilgrims. She photographed these structures when they were empty, with only the suggestion of anticipation of what was to come or the jubilation of what had just has happened.

In the most populous, frenzied place on earth, Weslien focused on the quiet. The empty shelters, constructed with the utility of discarded materials, reminded her of the temporary dwellings of so many global migrants whose journeys are not spiritual in nature, but necessary because of political unrest, natural disasters or economic injustice.

Her photographs were a starting point. Weslien, who directed graduate studies at MECA before taking a teaching position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, didn’t have a specific project in mind when she made these images. “I was just really curious what happens when you get this many people together,” she said. “How does it work? What is that yearning that people have that they can give up everything they have to make this journey?”

Recognizing her photographs lacked a tactile quality embedded in the pilgrimage experience, she decided to convert them into near-human-scale tapestries, so they both looked and felt like the actual tents, with their details represented in the intricate weaves. Using tapestries to tell the backstory of the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage appealed to Weslien because of the viewer’s ability to relate to the material in a tangible way.

“There is very little hierarchy when it comes to textiles and cloth,” she said. “The binaries that exist in fine art do not exist in textiles. … You cannot wash your hands with a painting.”

Her tapestries are made of wool, cotton, silk and other textiles.

Weslien’s first intent was to show large-scale photographs. She worked with her images for at least two years, blowing them up in scale in an attempt to accent the essence of the temporary structures. But whatever she tried, nothing quite worked – until she decided to pursue the images as tapestries. In addition to the everyman quality of textiles, Weslien liked the idea of using a creative process traditionally favored by the elite to render representational images, in cloth, of fabric structures used by masses of Hindus in the pursuit of their spiritual happiness and freedom.

“For me, it was so exciting to see how well (the photographs) translated into an image that is of the very materials that are there,” she said. “I have never done anything like this before. I have woven before – I started out in textiles – but Jacquard weaving is something completely different.”

Weslien worked with a multi-generational family in Ghent, Belgium, that specializes in Jacquard weaving, a distinctive style of “figurative” weaving favored by kings and queens because of the ability to fashion elaborate designs and textures. So named for its French inventor in the early 1800s, the Jacquard loom has since been updated for computer technology. She traveled to Ghent in February 2020, just before the pandemic forced a global shutdown, to meet with and talk to the weavers about the project, and then spent months afterward navigating language barriers and going back and forth – through emails and phone calls – about materials, colors and many technical concerns.

Weslien has worked with textiles much of her creative life and understood how wool was different than cotton, and how both would react with silk, to navigate this project from the fact-gathering phase in India to the investigative struggles of an artist in her studio in Portland, through the technical challenges of collaborating long distance – with language barriers – with artists in Belgium during the pandemic.

She will show six textiles at Speedwell. The largest, “Red Interior” and “Night Tent,” each measure 108 inches by 72 inches. In addition, she is showing a series of collages she made after walking pilgrimage routes of Durga temples in Varanasi, a city on the banks of the Ganges in India, and an invitational collaboration, “Walking Kailash,” which began when Weslien walked around the sacred mountain of Kailash in western Tibet. Both involve watermarks, made with water collected during her own visits and those by other artists to waterways near their homes. The “Walking Kailash” project also involves the publication of a book with the same title, stemming from Weslien’s pilgrimage to Mount Kailish with Tibetan scholar Robert Thurman 15 years ago.

Waters from the mountain feed tributaries of the Ganges, which ties these projects together.

“It didn’t start out that way, but I realized this exhibition has the continuity of how people make sense of their lives around this river,” Weslien said.

And “What Did You Smell While You Were Away?” is how Weslien makes sense of the world. Smith Galtney, a photographer and videographer, is making a short documentary about Weslien, which will be available for viewing in the gallery. (He’s done short films about other artists who have shown at Speedwell, including Alison Hildreth and the late Henry Wolyniec). Galtney spent a lot of time with Weslien two years ago, when she had a residency at Speedwell Projects and had hung the large-scale photographs from her Kumbh Mela experience on the walls. He understood, based on Weslien’s misgivings about the work then, the photos were a steppingstone to something else, and more a starting point to a larger project than an endpoint.

Turning the photographs into tapestries was an interesting and compelling outcome, Galtney said. “The idea of going there, taking these pictures, coming home and … then turning the photos back into fabric – giving them a tactile quality – was a sort of full-circle process,” he said.

And also, perhaps, the only possible outcome. In speaking with others about Weslien’s work, Galtney began to understand the vital role Weslien’s senses play in her travels and in her art. “Everyone talked about her heightened sense of touch whenever she travels. Her hands are always out to feel things,” he said. “She can go to a place where she doesn’t know the language or doesn’t know anything about the people, and she can bond with someone through touch. It’s a way of communication for her.”

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