Poetry in Stone and Ink
This February, Mona Saudi, one of the Arab world's best-known sculptors, holds her first exhibition in Amman in 15 years.
Words by Nicholas Seeley.
MONA SAUDI IS BEST known for her sculptures in marble and limestone, typically heavy, solid shapes, beautifully carved and polished into swirling, abstract forms that juxtapose the geometry of Euclid with that of nature and living things.
Hommage à Saint-John Perse, her new exhibition at Jacaranda this month, shows a somewhat different side to her, offering up her distinctive arrangements of shapes in the rather more ephemeral medium of silkscreen prints.
On paper, the images retain Saudi's distinctive style, but they perform quite differently, conveying a sense of fragility and a continuously transforming natural world, rather than the permanence at the heart of things.
The 22-piece show does include two limestone sculptures, including one called “And the Poet is Always Among Us,” a sizable piece that Saudi says she finished the day before the exhibition. The poet in question is Mahmoud Darwish, who the sculpture commemorates.
And it is poetry, Saudi says, that unites the unwavering slab of stone with the black outlines in the prints.
Aside from “The Poet,” the second major element of the exhibition is an album of 13 prints from 2009, inspired by one of the last poems of Nobel Laureate Saint-John Perse, “Song for an Equinox.” Each piece corresponds to a line from the poem, which is printed at the bottom in several languages.
Perse's work speaks in bold, vivid terms about standing at the still point of a changing world, and Saudi's pieces form a telling accompaniment. Other pieces on display include prints inspired by Darwish poems, and by “The Petra Tablets” by Syrian poet, Adonis. In the latter, the poem itself curls around the central images in scrawling black Arabic calligraphy, as if trying to unite the object, the description and the aroused sensation into a single plane of experience.
“It's the atmosphere of the poem that takes me,” Saudi explains. “It's not the images.”
“I love poetry because it's very concentrated. It says a lot in small sentences, and this is how I like to work with art: to simplify things so that they can have a very big resonance, a vibration around them. So the vibration of poetry and the vibration of drawing and the vibration of sculpture -- this is how I produce my work.”
Hommage à Saint-John Perse will be showing until February 28.
