ART MATTERS | 105
Travel and experiences of different cultures is also central to both artists’ art. Egypt was their first destination. “I started to make connections between the old and the new. I realized that time was nothing—there were artwork in Egypt that are four, five thousand years old. Art, I realized, is incredible,” Gea says. We tend to assume that modernity is linear, but this isn’t so, says Gea, who says the spectacular nature of ancient artwork stunned her with their precision and beauty. In a “View from Heaven,” ancients and moderns share space as they look down from a circular opening in the ornately tiled sky. The people looking down are winged, and of many nationalities. Outside, dinorsaurs parade in a circle. “That’s the first life on earth. And if you look closely enough, you can see a prehistorical Mickey Mouse,” Gea says, smiling at her own visual joke. What appears to be the ornately cracked tile background is actually text from Dante’s Paradiso. “They are looking down, we are looking up—its double vision,” Gea says. The ceiling was inspired by a trip to Guatemala, when she looked up and saw a hole in the roof, and also by the summer home of a friend in Venice. Just as Gea’s work is shaped by place, so is Nan Mulder’s. Nan married an Englishman and moved to Scotland and then to Ireland; divorced him, then returned back to Scotland with her children. “Holland is a crowded country. I always wanted to move abroad—I’ve lived abroad