Powder art adds to festivities

Young girls enjoy the Diwali festivities. Photo / Sarah Ivey.

I enjoyed the festival confusion this week. After all, aren't carnivals about chaos? We had fireworks on Halloween in Aotea Square, only they weren't for Halloween, they were for Diwali - except this year, Diwali didn't officially start until Guy Fawkes.

But whether you're celebrating the souls of the dead with a jack-o-lantern, a dead would-be revolutionary with fireworks, or the immortal Goddess of Wealth with lanterns and fireworks - or all of the above - Happy Festivals of Lights!

In an Aotea Centre foyer before the fireworks, artist Smita Upadhye cheerfully demonstrated another, less-flammable way of celebrating Diwali. With a pinch of glittering marble dust between thumb and forefinger and a flick of the wrist, she created a white curve of powder on a dark sheet of paper.

This is how you make outlines if you're an expert in "rangoli", the art of creating patterns and images with coloured powders. For non-experts, Upadhye also had small rectangular cheat trays, one punched with holes outlining an elephant, another - postmodern style - outlining Christmas bells and holly. Lay the tray on your paper, sprinkle fine grounds on your tray so they fall in the holes, lift the tray and a-cha! You have made a picture in powder.

Although the art is similar to Buddhist sand mandala making, rangoli was traditionally a domestic female art, like European embroidery, and is not always religious. While sand mandalas are destroyed to illustrate the temporary nature of life, changing rangoli is not imbued with any particular significance.

Not so long ago, many home floors in India were decorated with rice flour or stone powder, and the pattern could be changed every day. "We change them like we change our dresses," says Upadhye.

Patterns are passed on from mother to daughter, and from neighbour to neighbour, like recipes. More complicated, larger patterns are used for auspicious occasions like birthdays - or Diwali.

Diwali patterns sometimes include the lotus flower as a symbol of Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth, or her footprints, as she is being welcomed into people's houses for the Gudjurati New Year.

The festival workshops were mostly attended by children (why don't grownups try new creative endeavours in public?). Upadhye suggested a simple image of a lamp for their first rangoli- as with all rangoli designs, her lamp's lines were unbroken and met each other to symbolise unity.

Pinned to the partition behind Upadhye was a rangoli of an elephant painstakingly picked out in pulses, lentils and rice. Rangoli can also be made of flower petals - marigolds and chrysanthemums, for example.

Beside the elephant was a still from the short film Fleeting Beauty, in which an Indian woman recounts the history of the spice trade in a rangoli on her Pakeha lover's back; the rangoli, of course, was actually created by Upadhye.

And finally, photographs of her impressive, award-winning patriotic rangoli portraits of Helen Clark and Edmund Hillary were displayed.