Dear ,
It’s done! I have left my studio, and with it quite a lot of notions about being an artist that I no longer want to entertain. For the first time in a decade I’m back to working on my living room table, and have almost finished tidying up all my materials into my small flat. It feels great and I have no regrets.
The very morning after I handed in the studio keys, I woke up with a vision of something I needed to do, which I share below as a work in progress.
Till next month, enjoy passing the Equinox into spring and light,
Joumana
Lately on Caravanserai:
Big news: I decided to remove the paywall from my archive of posts. Everyone can now access all my past articles. There is a lot of original research and material in there, and I’d rather it could be accessed, referred to and cited freely (with proper credit, of course). Instead I will rely on people’s goodwill to take out paid subscriptions if and when they can, to support my independent research.
Jan 25: Patterns under the Sandalwood Dome – The Art of Haft Peykar, part 6
Feb 19: Patterns under the White Dome – The Art of Haft Peykar, part 7 (end)
Mar 10: Lost Symbols – Comings and goings in the Arabic script
Wake, indigo on awagami washi paper. 25x??? cm. Work in progress
With over 31,500 killed in Gaza so far, I was struggling with number blindness. When numbers become so large they lose all meaning, how do you remain awake to the scale of the slaughter & the personhood of the victims?
I needed to have them in front of my eyes. So I started to write: one letter per soul torn from life —man, woman or child. This piece has barely begun and I don’t know when it will end, or if I’ll be able to complete it. But the process itself is a prayer for the dead, a promise they won't vanish out of sight or out of mind.
Despite the simplicity of this piece, there’s quite a lot of symbolism woven into it…
There’s a new shop section: Clearance & Sundry, for end-of-stock items and others that don’t really fit under another section. At the moment there are a few random leftover prints handfinished with gold. But one new item of interest is a giclée poster version of Trees are Poems, in its full original size of 15x150cm. It’s not simple to print so I only have 3 of these!
"Wake" is... it is hard to find the words... but it is something we need to be mindful of the suffering and deaths of so many. Thank you.