Palimpsest
Sara Bowen, Australia
| Palimpsest; Sara
Bowen, New South Wales, Australia, 2013 The word Palimpsest (pæl Imp sεst) comes from the Greek word palimpsestos, meaning “rubbed again” and refers to the re-use of expensive parchment by scraping off the original text or drawings and writing over them again. This book examines the notion of the pavement as a palimpsest, written and re-written with the lives of those walking over it. I've looked at many ideas and images in the making of this book; I've started and stopped many journeys, abandoning half-made books as I go because I ran into a technical or conceptual problem. It has been hard to narrow down the making to one particular book, but I realised that I am always drawn to surface, and that I have looked repeatedly at one photograph of a Baghdad pavement strewn with fragments of paper after a bomb detonated. The photograph at once described the destruction and failed to tell the whole story: where did the fragmented pages come from? Who had owned them, and what happened to them? Palimpsest is a concertina book that marries a long-standing use of hand paper cutting and blind embossing with printmaking techniques. A scuffed stretch of cobble stone pavement carries marks of daily life: foot prints, grime and cigarette butts. Indeterminate stains could be blood or paint. Caught in the cracks between the cobbles dirt collects: enough, eventually, to sustain life. The plants that grow in the cracks in a pavement are weeds: hardy, displaced, opportunistic. Tenaciously they sprout in barren places, even places where atrocities have happened. In Palimpsest the small sprouts are of pomegranate trees, symbols of fertility and new life. The Persian hero Isfandiyar ate pomegranates and became invincible; in Greek mythology Persephone ate pomegranate seeds which condemned her to spend some months of the year in Hades, bringing winter on the world. Pomegranate seeds, the colour of blood, are used in making kolyva for memorial services, and as a tonic for the heart in Ayurvedic medicine. Encoded in the surface of the paper are meanings and memories, literal and abstracted reference. They are the beginning of a story. 72cm wide x 18.5cm tall (maximum dimensions); 300gsm Somerset rough etching paper with paint, etching ink, pop-up mechanism, paper cutting. Edition size: 8 I am an artist living on the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. I am a printmaker and I make artists' books, and in 2008 I founded international artists' book collective BookArtObject. When I'm not in my studio I'm usually to be found in my garden. http://doubleelephant.wordpress.com |