As I washed my dad’s dead body, I thought of how much of a Cycle of Life there is. How life cycles on and on.
My dad must have washed me when I was a baby: his first child. I freshened him up through his time in the hospice. Just because he died, I wasn’t going to stop washing him: my one and only dad,
I presented a series of versions of these images at the Showroom Gallery: getting fruitier as we went along. I didn’t have time to make it bigger then, and we anyway only had one spare projector.
But now I’ve created a much larger and fruitier forest.
It would be 2 metres long if you print it out on paper. But its actually intended to be projected around the walls of a room, filling a space with fruit forest. I – or maybe you? – stand in the middle speaking and miming washing my dad’s dead body. The words I spoke in the Showroom performance are here.
My forest is made using tree-images derived from the (still largely intact – Alhamdulillah!) mosaics in the Great mosque at Damascus. Plus some mountain firs from the Alpine Black Run. The fruit is Persian: pomegranates, dates and persimmons.
I automatically constructed my ‘forest’ from right to right, since that is how you ‘read’ many Persian paintings (text is read that way).
But it’s intended to be seen as a continuous and ever changing cycle. A true Cycle of Life.
Check out the stories from before this – of how my dad and I talked about his last skiing Black Run (1), and then he did some Deathbed Skiing (2), before he took his last breath and his heart stopped beating (3).