They Dared to Speak the Truth
Sarah Reith & David Smith-Ferri, USA
| They Dared to Speak
the Truth; Poetry by David Smith-Ferri.
Visual art and book creation by Sarah Reith. Mendocino County, California,
USA, August 2012 They Dared to Speak the Truth is a sampling of poems from David Smith-Ferri's two poetry collections, With Children Like Your Own and Battlefield Without Borders, about his visits to war torn Iraq and Afghanistan. In my selection, ordering, and illustration of these pieces, I tried to visually restate the qualities of compassion and investigation that his poetry conveyed to me. David's poems are a mix of interview transcripts, straight-up crime reporting on the atrocities of war, and lyrical meditations on love and the beauty of the Afghan landscape. This is an overwhelming body of work - but al-Mutanabbi Street is a project of witness, and there is no more overwhelming experience than that of modern warfare. If I could sum up this collaboration in one word, it would be 'testify.' In my illustrations of David's poems, I tried to draw attention to one moment in each, so as to emphasise what stood out to me as the driving point. I find that human hands are deeply expressive and spiritually powerful, so I used them extensively in my artwork to invite readers and viewers to take a closer look at the poems and have an emotional response to the stories and voices David presents. I have read that the oldest artwork on the most ancient caves was signed by a charcoal-smudged hand. In my own small way, using charcoal and pastel, I have also tried to create a body of work that will testify to our common humanity. There are three copies of this book in existence. They are nine inches wide, fourteen inches long and 28 pages long. They were completed in August, 2012. I used a variety of materials, including ribbon, gauze, burnt paper, tissue paper, beads, and dirt. The illustrations themselves were made with fairly conventional media, including charcoal, pastel, watercolour, crayon, and graphite. Each poem is accompanied by a drawing and some kind of structure that partially obscures the text, so that the reader/viewer has to interact with the book, peeling aside a layer of distraction or obscurity in order to come in contact with the stories and poems. sarah.maria.reith@gmail.com |