Alms purse depicting a woman with a falconry glove holding two mounted falcons and a dismembered raptor’s leg (top), and a falconer embracing and crowning his lover (bottom). In the lower panel, a mended patch obscures where a raptor once perched on the falconer’s glove.
“The contents of the museum were moved to a bunker / and then disappeared. Old photos show us what was lost / a few black-and-white Old Masters taken at a distance
a grainy picture of a statue, hunched, ready for flight / the parure of a lost queen on a throat of ancient velvet. / Even the urge to speculate on their fate is muted now:
shipped out wrapped in sack, burnt or heaped over / with the gravel and rock of a dying city. The odd leads / trails into darkness, which is where the other nine-tenths
of human endeavour end. The known world expands / but the world we buried grows faster still. Its statuary fills / a universe of mirrored halls, its songs echo soundlessly,
and tangled in the stars a thousand poets whose faces / lie smashed under battlefields. As we seek to perfect / the chord, the line, the divine form, remember
wax tablets, scrolls, scribbles on palace walls / trampled into strata, remember how porcelain / melted, remember there’s an undone precedent
for everything we’ve done. Somewhere dark energy / is shooting coins from forgotten civilisations / into a jukebox larger than the sun.”
Finished this back in October, but everyone look at the Joan of Arc tapestry I made based on this vintage pattern. This is about 30 inches wide and 27 inches long, its huge!
For the first time since the 1948 Nakba, there was no Christmas tree lighting outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Palestine.
In its place, an installation depicting the nativity scene is placed in solidarity with the people of Gaza who have been facing a harrowing Israeli aggression for the past 80 days, an aggression so catastrophic that it lead to cancelling Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem this year.
With the nativity models placed amid rubble and barbed wire, the star of Bethlehem is represented by the aftermath of a bomb hitting their shelter. The scene replicates those following Israeli shelling of civilian homes in Gaza.
