Mani Wall
I visited Mustang, Nepal, led by my daughter, Sienna. One day on horseback, we encountered a sinuous thousand foot long wall of boulders etched with Tibetan prayers, mani. Its form rose from the plain, foreshortening space like an oncoming train. The wall represents intestines of a demoness who had been dismembered and reconfigured as part of the sacred landscape, when the incipient catechism of Buddhism absorbed and reinterpreted local worldviews. The wall was washed in sacred mineral colors of the three protector deities: rust red for Vajrapani, clay gray for Manjushree, and chalk white for Avalokiteshvara.
This mani wall that I encountered in Mustang, Nepal, etched itself into my memory. The inscribed mani looked like fossils. The painted stripes like the minerals that naturally weep out of oxide rich sedimentary rock of the trans-Himalayan plateau.

The act of drawing helps me to see, and it allows what I see to become a part of me.
This series of paintings began with graphite drawings of an iris flower in all its phases. A flower is a beautiful thing. A flower’s life span is relatively short so it is easier to appreciate one complete living cycle, from tender bud to brittle detritus, to pod. I poured and brushed layers of color—sienna, grey and white—over the drawings so that the colors enveloped them. The images of flowers are my prayer, embedded in painted paper, still as a fossil, bone still, and drenched with the colors of the earth.

Mani is from *Om mani padme hum – literally, "Hail the jewel in the lotus" - a mantra to Chenrezig/Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, of whom His Holiness the Dalai Lama is an incarnation.

see the artist's book
A Sacred Geography: Sonnets of the Himalaya and Tibet

see images from the show at UCLA's Fowler Gallery
Mani Wall and A Scared Geography

UCLA Fowler Museum exhibition: “Mani Wall and A Sacred Geography: an installation of paintings, the artist book by Mary Heebner and Sienna Craig with photography by Macduff Everton."

Opens June 11, 2006 . This exhibition will be concurrent with “The Missing Peace: Portraits of the Dalai Lama,” a travelling exhibition of 50 artists initiating at the Fowler Museum.