Tall Grasses

In this work, the artist considers how the act of borrowing or summoning an object from an archive—namely a landscape painting called Al Wadi made by her father, Ghassan Bishouty, in the early ‘80s—automatically remoulds and distorts it into something else that can only be experienced in the present. This transformative act of extracting from the archive irreversibly alters the original object to a point of no return, or perhaps destroys it.

The archive in question, being one belonging to a colonized people, is one that could be deemed forbidden, and continuously under the threat of loss, damage, or confiscation. In returning to the archive, albeit an unofficial one containing familial records, letters, diaries, photographs, objects, and artworks, the work concurrently carries a dimension of both time and home.

The original painting depicts an expansive Jordanian landscape composed of desert ochres and dry greens and blues, and is punctuated with vignettes of imagined Bedouin activity: a couple dressed in gesturally traditional clothing encircling a fire pit and romancing over a pot of coffee, a woman feeding a brood of chickens before the quintessential caravan in the horizon, and so on. Scrubby foliage, rocks, and water features dominate the foreground of the image, leading the eye towards an unspecified or uncomfortable distance marked by vague suggestions of palm trees on a tawny hillside.

In the artist’s rendition, the idea of home is addressed with a hesitation towards specificity. It takes on the form of a nondescript, yet discernible expanse of land that unfolds in a distorted and pixelated rendering. Punctuated stitches forcibly blend a dim artificial colour palette, creating a murky depth where irregularities interrupt the horizontal plane, resembling scan lines, mirrored shapes, or posterization. The landscape of home is never fully revealed, but rather, emerges incrementally.

The piece was hand embroidered by Tamam al Yasouri.