Judith Conant Chase first arrived in Nepal in the fall of 1974. During her nine months in Asia, she spent five in Nepal. She returned to Boulder, Colorado, for a year and found support for her book project from a family foundation. She returned to Nepal in the fall of 1976 and began her research. She travelled to different places in Nepal by herself for years, usually with a porter or two. She stayed with local people experiencing “the nature of their lives,” as she recalls, and their festivals, rituals and feasts.

“In my earliest explorations, I was simply watching material beauty; a miraculous little curve of brass, an enormous gold earring, a luscious oily wooden vessel. And I wanted to meet the artists, find a new surprising design or technique in the next village, over the next ridge. Conversations in tea stalls, open markets and festivals always brought excited stories from the local people about another kind of basket or knife or fiber; everyone wanted to tell me about their own village’s special coat or a distinctive ceremony.”

From the lowlands of Terai to the peaks in the north, covering the middle hills, Judith spent eighteen years understanding and documenting the cultures, art, festivals, objects, fabrics and clothes, myths and legends and the lifestyle of different ethnic groups.

“Because of the intimate relationship between natural resources and the makers of things, the diversity of the ecology from one area of the country to another is reflected in handmade objects.”

Through this journey, her perspective was lifted above material beauty – to the connections these material cultures of different communities had with their lifestyle and beliefs.

“The activities of Nepali life activate the voices of each object. Because of the people’s devotion, the objects sing, dance, spin and pour, bestow grace.”

After years of travelling and living alone in Nepal, she married Jim Danisch in 1984. Danisch was an artist-potter who, at the time, was working with GTZ to introduce the technology for high-fire glazed ceramics that he developed, which would suit Nepal’s ceramic industry. After marriage, they moved to Gamcha village, Dadhikot, to introduce organic practices and integrate the word “organic” into the agricultural terminology of Nepal. In 1987, they started organic farming at Gamcha village, encouraging the local farmers to grow vegetables and field crops organically, eventually involving 160 families in a marketing system. She started the first organic farmers’ markets at Mike’s Breakfast and Summit Hotel around 1990. She now has more than 40 years of experience in organic farming.

During the 1900s, she lived in California, where she joined “writing cum dining” sessions that helped her clarify and streamline some of her writings. Her stay in California eventually made her realize that Nepal was her home. She sent her entire collection back to Nepal to establish Living Traditions Museum in Changu Narayana, which began functioning in 2012 to present the richness of Nepali arts and culture.

“The lives of the Nepali people and their art objects are elegant, inspirated, vigorous, humorous, vibrant, romantic, sometimes even a bit wild. The objects are born – woven, hammered, carved, turned, painted – out of hands of artists, both household and professional. Each object expresses something of its source in forest or clay pit or trade as well as something of life it has led within a family or its culture.” (source: the brochure of Living Traditions Museum)

With the support of her colleagues and especially her husband, she also began materializing her research into the book, “The Beauty of Purposeful Living: Living Traditions of Nepal,” which would also connect to her collections in the museum.

“Jim and I were complementary artists … We have worked together daily, Jim enhancing the images, me continually refining the text, both of us together designing the relationships between words and images.” 

However, Jim passed away in 2016. In remembrance of Jim, she dedicated the book to him, and it was published in 2019. For the past few years, she has retired to Patalekhet, Kavre, where Jim and Judith had founded Everything Organic Nursery in 2010. The nursery specializes in organic fruit and nut tree production, intending to introduce new varieties suitable to Nepal’s environments. Today, Judith spends her day like any ordinary Nepali in the village and looks after her farm. Her residence is decorated with objects she collected from around the world. Besides looking after some of the collections she had to bring back to her own care and storage after the 2015 earthquake, she is also living her passion for organic farming that she had already sparked from her earlier visit to Nepal. An excerpt from her book, from her initial days in Kathmandu:

“When our group of seven or eight finally gathers in Kathmandu, the others, ready for mountaineering, are not as captivated by fruits and vegetables as I am.”

Currently, Judith is constantly thinking of ways to upgrade her farm. She imports varieties of exotic vegetables and fruits that can be a further addition to the Nepali farmers’ market. She is living peaceful and content retirement days surrounded by the alluring hills of Patalekhet, indulging herself in little things that she loves and cares about.

Multiple sites in/between the plains of Terai to settlements in the

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1. “The Beauty of Purposeful Living: Living Traditions of Nepal,” 2019.

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