Tigris/Thames

Description

This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content. "Reading through the 'Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, ' anthology from coalition founder Beau Beausoleil, poets and their writings seemed to be a dominant theme. Not too surprising as the Al-Mutanabbi of the street name was a famous Iraqi poet. This was my starting point, but I also wanted to have a link between this book and the ones I was making about the river Thames for my MA Degree show. My research found that the Tigris flows passed one end of Al-Mutanabbi Street. I thought it might be difficult to find a suitable poem about the Tigris, but The British Museum provided the perfect answer. In 2006 they staged an exhibition, Word into Art, which showed a fibreglass sculpture by the Iraqi born artist Dia al-Azzawi, who now lives and works in London. The sculpture, Blessed Tigris, is six metres high and represents a 9C minaret on the banks of the Tigris. It is inscribed with the poem, 'O Blessed Tigris, ' (1962) by Iraqi poet, Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, (1899-1997). 'The River's Tale, ' (1911) by Rudyard Kipling, (1865-1936) is my Thames poem. Both are about history, memory, loss and bloodshed, and lent themselves to being broken down into a few lines at a time, so they could be spread over several pages. I wanted to make big, grand books with hard covers and wooden spines, but the pleas for weight consideration overrode this, and I have made simple dos-à-dos pamphlet structures. My choice of cover, black and gold Bangladeshi cotton rag paper, is in response to a quote in the coalition anthology, 'in a world being brightened with colour, they tried to turn everything black'"--Artist's statement from the Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website (viewed June 9, 2015).

Subjects