Artist’s Statement

                     It is difficult
to get the news from poems
            yet men die miserably every day
                                for lack
of what is found there.
                                William Carlos Williams

Poetry has always been central to my art practice; it is my source of inspiration and my method of thinking. Whether in my abstract images or in my work with text, I view all the marks I make on the picture plane as words, as emotionally evocative, if not completely decipherable, symbolic entities.
My abstract works include drawings, oil paintings, and mixed-media works on paper. In my mixed-media works I combine woodcuts with collage and drawing on rice paper and mount them on stretched canvas so that the images float in space without borders. Formally, they are studies of organic patterns derived from woodgrain, bark, and the random way pigments settle on a canvas. The infinite quality of these patterns recalls textiles for many, but they are more aptly related to the tradition of pattern-making in Islamic art. While retaining this tradition’s infinite aspect, I question its rigorous geometric grid and its governing Platonic aesthetic. Unlike Plato, I think that perfection is to be found in nature, and not in the human simplification of it. The spaces I create are intended to allow viewers to meander, to recall the vastness, complexity, and mystifying qualities of nature.
A few years ago, I came across these lines by Adonis, a contemporary Arab poet: Black ink is flowing/over the papers of this/world: white cannot/be unless it is fertilized by black luster. They felt like an assignment, not only to make visual the images of the poem, but also to include the text. This encounter with Adonis marked the beginning of a new direction in my work. I began by making a portfolio of prints entitled The Prophet of Black Folk, in which I drew on Adonis’s poetry and accounts of the ninth-century poet Ali Ibn Mohamed who led an African slave revolt in Iraq’s southern marshes. In 2005, I made an artist’s book: Cultures Of War: An Essay, in which I used the language of American writers, poets, and leaders in order to highlight how certain cultural attitudes –racism, a misplaced sense of strength, or charity— are grounds for effective war propaganda and give rise to war in much the same way as the geopolitical reasons more readily brought up to explain it. My second book, The Tree of My Mind, also borrows the words of others, this time to reflect on trees, their meanings, and their use as metaphors for human beings. Currently, I am researching the various ways in which poetry was/is perceived as a threat, as did Plato who proposed to expel poets from his ideal city.

Nov 2007 © Emna Zghal