Traces

On a smooth copper plate, I draw the scene with a sharp instrument after I put the soft wax that isolates the acid from the white etch that I want, and etches the black that I painted.

I add gray and black spaces with rosin at times, and fabric materials at other times.

To see the result of what I etch, I put a sticky ink on the plate, and start cleaning for it to go into the pores that I etched. The drawing begins to appear. I place the plate on the press machine, and a wet cotton paper on top of it. With very high pressure, the press machine rotates to convey all that was etched on the paper, and I see the result of all what was etched. It is like giving birth.

I get several copies of that plate, repeating the printing for a few copies.On that paper I see all the traces I left on the plate.

Printmaking is extremely delicate, any trace you leave will eventually appear in the printing, and this is what I want to record in this work.

That`s why I chose printmaking, as it preserves those traces, without which the work cannot be complete.

I was born in 1980. I grew up with no written or drawn reference recording what were happening in the1980s, and I do not want for the next generation to float without memory.

I had to find a justification for myself: How can I stand survival after I was forced to leave my home country?

Seven years into the revolution in search of our identity, and then I was so simply expelled in 2017. I wrote on the wall of my studio in Beirut: «Meaningless is my existence if I don’t draw.»

I will record what I have been through and will leave the traces in my etching work, in a studio that is not mine and an apartment that I do not belong to.

On A Thread

On that thread, between life and absence

on her green leaf I stand

a crow doesn't care

between wind and water

there is a consort

what a beautiful trip…