Description: This scroll unrolls to read Ṣabr (“patience”) repeated in a light and delicate composition. Yet as it’s rolled out, a different text starts showing on the reverse, in a much coarser and darker script. The words, which can only be glimpsed, start with expectant hope and progress through different states of anxiety and fear to despair, getting darker and multiplying along the way, while the front remains unchanging.
This piece was originally conceived in October, as, not for the first time in my life, I watched violence erupt in the Levant and threats of escalation being directed at my birthplace. Every time this happens, the pattern is the same: You wait, hoping it will all calm down quickly. And you wait, and you wait some more. Outwardly you keep a cool and composed front for the sake of others, but in the places you keep hidden, hope is turning into anxiety, then into fear, and a mess of emotions that are increasingly dark and hopeless.
Though the idea came from a very specific event, this experience of anxious waiting is one I believe we’ve all experienced at some level in life. The occasion may not always be life and death, but the emotional intensity is no less for it. There was originally going to be an ending to the scroll, a resolution I found for myself, but when it came to the making I opted to have no known end: the paper runs out, but the waiting continues.
The design on the front is based on stucco panels of Alhambra featuring Kufi calligraphy and biomorphic patterns, painted here with lapis lazuli and a mixture of azurite and chrysocolla as I wanted a very cool overall tone.
In contrast, the back is based on the one-off script of the “Nurse’s Qur’an”, which is a bold, coarse and rather chaotic take on the refined Eastern Kufi scripts. It’s written using eight tones of earth pigments foraged in Lebanon, increasingly dark and mud-like. I used an extra layer of egg tempera over the script so the pigments wouldn’t rub off too easily into the front design; nevertheless this happens a little as we approach the end of the scroll, which feels appropriate in the same way as repressed emotions are bound to leak out to an extent.
Materials: Foraged ochres and mineral pigments in egg and gum tempera on paper, linen thread, leather flap, brass closure; vintage wooden rolling pin, marble stand.
Size: Scroll surface: 200x24 cm. Size rolled on stand: approx. 38x6x8 cm.
Completed: 18 August 2024.
Studio price: sold.
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