Earth Door Sky Door: Paintings of Mustang

Architectural paintings in watercolour from the Himalayan kingdom of Mustang in northern Nepal by Robert Powell are the subject of a major travelling exhibition. The landscape of Mustang is stripped of comfort, dry, windblown, dramatic and overwhelming in scale. Yet with the careful control of water, man-made islands of subsistence arose in remote corners. The structures man builds to maintain these islands, and to thrive, are the subjects of these paintings. Virtually every built object in Mustang bears the sings of ritual activity: from prehistoric hand-dug cave systems to ruined hilltop castles, from densely clustered villages to isolated temples, from propitiatory stacks of yak horns to the sophisticated cosmology of the chorten.