The title is Paradise Now: Sappho in the Age of the Suicide Bomber. It is all hand-stitched on canvas and silk. 27ftx7ft.

The idea of the piece was to be wrapped around a wooden replica of the Ka’bah, the holy Muslim place of worship. That is why it has an aura of a tent in the desert. The importance of vintage textiles, hand-weaving, silk-making, of clothing & body decorations in the history of women’s experience, as well as in the history of the practice of holy worship (traditionally adorned with the most elaborate textures donated by hard-working devout women) informs the material conception of the piece. Because of space limitations, as well as my own considerations re: exposure of a potentially controversial religious replica, I think putting it on the long wall is fine, if the space is available. If not, we’ll revert to my earlier concept happily.

Paradise Now juxtaposes different trappings, or ideals, and clichés of womanhood and femininity. The figures in the foreground evoke the bigger-than-life procession of adorants and priestesses that were typically frescoed on the walls of corridors leading to holy temples and inner sanctums of worship in most ancient sacred sites. The background figures are a version of the Greek chorus that comments in every ancient Greek play and they represent generations of my ancestors, from Greece and Egypt and Asia Minor, all of whom spent their lives covered from head to toe in black or grey, all of whom embroidered and wove, and whose spirits-ghosts haunt me as I work in this medium. The central theme of Paradise Now is woman as object and subject in relation to social power structures, and each figure is partially draped or uncovered for a specific reason. All the figures in the foreground gaze at the viewer; all the figures in the background have hollow gazes. A secondary theme is time: how the past strangeholds the present and the Old World chokes the New. (the title echoes the New Age motto: Live in the Now, be in the eternal Present.) Every foreground figure represents my alter ego at different times; Sappho, in the title, encapsulates the notion of the uber-alter-ego.