Temperance

The two waters she mixes are everything Varanasi holds at once

"Temperance" is a mural painted by Neve in Varanasi, India — one of the oldest and most sacred cities on earth. The work takes its name and its visual language from the Tarot card of the same name: a figure pouring water between two vessels, endlessly balancing opposing forces.

Here the figure is a young Indian woman in traditional dress — white sari, gold jewellery, flower garlands, hands traced with henna — who pours water with absolute stillness and concentration. Behind her, the city of Varanasi dissolves into the background: the ancient ghats and the chaos of the riverfront rendered as a sketched urban glow, the sacred made contemporary. The two waters she mixes are everything Varanasi holds at once: the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, life and death, the Ganges — water for ritual — and water for drinking. Technology and millennia of unbroken tradition. The figure does not choose between them. She mixes. The work is also a personal one. Neve spent days alone in Varanasi, overwhelmed by the power of the city, the presence of Shiva, the weight of a place where death is lived openly and without fear. "Temperance" is also a record of that inner experience — the attempt to hold opposing things without resolving them.