Covered Words, Shattered Pieces

Description:	aquatint and dry point. Edition of 8 The 2007 car bomb that exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street tore through the cultural life of Baghdad. They city’s layers of cultural history, although damaged, survive despite the bombs and conflicts. The image ‘Covered Words, Shattered Pieces’ refers to the many assaults on Iraq’s recent and ancient history. Sources for my imagery include a 13th-century illuminated Arabic book, Assyrian low reliefs, cuneiform writing, paperback books, and materials of paper, earth and clay.I began by aligning abstract shapes in an orderly pattern. The shapes follow one another linearly and become for me a vocabulary and a language of presenting symbols or pictograms. I often line up shapes or isolated rows of shapes – much like creating a narrative. In this case the arrangement also has loosely defined zones or sections. The middle, main section is emphasized by scale and position while the upper and lower rows enclose that midsection.The shapes were cut into stencils and then arranged and traced directly on a copper etching plate using an etching needle. This is the dry point technique. The drawn line pulls up an edge or burr of the copper so that the ink feathers along the line. Successive layers of aquatint (four or five) and dry point were added until the texture and value had a certain depth relating to excavation and archaeology.The design of ‘Covered Words, Shattered Pieces’ groups the shapes into areas. This was inspired by the illustrations in a 13th-century illuminated Arabic book. Originally written in the 9th century, Maqamat was rewritten in the 11th century by al-Hariri from Basra. His rhymed prose was later illustrated in the 13th-century illuminated edition by the artist Yahya Ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti from southern Iraq. Maqamat is a series of stories following the adventures of a rogue. He enchants with his rhetorical abilities, recites Arabic poetry and fools even the narrator. The writing was considered so remarkable that it became a textbook for rhetoric and lexicography. Maqamat spread through the Arabic world and later was translated and rewritten into Hebrew in Spain.The history of Maqamat follows a wonderful course of travel, translation and imitation. The book is proof that reading, writing and visual art endure because the values of a culture are tied to its artistic and intellectual life. The resilience of Maqamat is a hopeful analogy to al-Mutanabbi’s survival. My shapes in ‘Covered Words, Shattered Pieces’ look buried but there is hope they will re-emerge.
Origin:	2015
Created By:	Mase, Marilyn
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Publisher:	(Jamaica Plain, MA, USA)
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/1282
Collection:	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection
Rights:	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Copyright:	In Copyright
Subjects:	artists book art bookworks

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