First Bristol meeting (3)
TEXTS FOR THE AFTERLIFE
While sketching the Assyrian Panels, I remembered a dream I had about my mother about a year after she had died. In her life, she always wore the Zoroastrian symbol around her neck, the Apkalle made of gold. To her, It was a symbol of recognition of what Iran was before Islam came along and tried to destroy (but luckily failed). In the dream she had hooked up with one of the great Kings and was complaining about how demanding he was and how exhausted she was getting! There was an exasperated fondness in her voice and I woke up feeling amused at how typical of my mother this would be.
I loved looking at the cuneiform script inscribed into the panels, some flowing across the image itself. I noted down the production process as I found it interesting; ‘Alabaster slabs were set up around the room to be made. Artists drew the design and masons/artists carved them in relief. Scribes then wrote out the text and the masons (who were illiterate so did not understand what they were writing) cut the cuneiform into relief. ‘
Is there power in the physical creation of a text if you don’t know what it means?
What was the status of the masons compared to the artists compared to the scribes in those days?
I spent my last hour at the China show, freshly curated space aimed at younger audiences with a real playful feel.
The objects that caught my eye were;
– A funerary land deed (AD1626, Jing Dezchen, Jiang Xi province) written on blue on white ceramic recording personal + family history + written for a ‘bureaucratic spirit world’ .God forbid they have bureaucrats in the afterlife but it made for an interesting object and idea. Creating objects for an afterlife? A possible starting point. Both Egyptian and the Chinese have examples of these developed n very different ways.
– A scroll written on by Mao Ze Ting of The Long march’ . The totally erratic flow of his writing compared to the land deed was what struck me. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
