Category: Dreams of Amarna
The Map of Amarna is Finished – Part Two
Continuing my look back over the Map of Amarna now I’ve finished it…
Detail Of Villages And Cultivation
Regular readers will recall that I spent a long time thinking about the stitch I intended to use for the cultivation, and not just that, but selecting the appropriate thread or threads to use for it. In the end I chose tête de boeuf stitch for the cultivation (upside down in relation to the diagram on the page I’ve linked to, making it look more plant-like) , and although you can’t see it in this photo (zoom in on the main photo on the first post on the completed map instead), I used four different fine silk threads to create changes of colour and effect, reminiscent of different crops.
For the modern villages, I used a variegated silk thread, which I used for the text relating to those villages as well, and chose Sorbello stitch, stitched very small, and very regularly spaced. It’s unlikely in the extreme that any rural village, anywhere in the world, would be laid out in a grid pattern, but again the intention is to create a marked textural contrast between the cultivation and the settlement.
Detail Of Scale
Working the scale for the map gave me some trouble. For the text, again I used split stitch, as I had on the second level title, and eventually I chose to use an interlaced stitch for the dark sections of the scale.
This stitch echoes the reverse herringbone stitch I used for the contour lines. I know that most of the people who see this when I eventually finish it won’t appreciate that sort of detail, but there will be some who will!
Map With Edges
This was the point at which I laid out my finished map on the floor with the other fabrics which I intend to use for the borders, and gave myself a serious fright.
Remember these diagrams in my post in August 2010? These borders are where the “patches”, like the Felucca and the Faience Hippopotamus, will go. Of course this is very approximate – I don’t intend to cut into these fabrics until I’m much more sure of how I’m going to put the pieces together than I am at present – but these borders are about the right proportions, and as it stands they aren’t going to leave much space for the patches.
I may have to edit my patches and fragments very much more ruthlessly than I had intended.
The Map of Amarna is Finished – Part One
Finished Map of Amarna
At last I have finished the Amarna Map!
This has been a very long road. I started work on this panel – itself intended only as the background of a larger piece – before I started this blog. About four years ago, in fact. I am going to write two posts about this, because while I am looking back over my choices, I am also planning the use to which the panel will be put….
Contour Lines
When I first started on it, it was easy to choose reverse herringbone stitch, or shadowwork for the contour lines. When the piece is pressed and mounted the reverse herringbone will create a slight contour effect. Click on the image and enlarge it and you wll see what I mean.
This is one of the primary concerns of my stitch choice – to create an effect that is reminiscent of the item or object being depicted without attempting to show it in a direct fashion.
The choice of back stitch for the main text was easy too. I wanted a simple line to create the text wiithout drawing undue attention to itself, and back stitch is about as unobtrusive as a stitch can be!
Title Text Detail
When it came to the Main title at the top of the panel, I chose split stitch for the second title, because again, I was looking for a plain stitch, with a little more weight than the back stitch, but not too eye-catching. For the main title I picked up one of the stitches from the Tudor and Stuart Masterclass – it’s lovely to find myself using a stitch I’ve learnt recently in a project I first started thinking about over fifteen years ago, when I first read the book that inspired it, “Nefertiti Lived Here“, by Mary Chubb.
More Amarna Research
The Felucca
I did say, when I first began working on the “Dreams of Amarna” panels, that I did not intend to become an Egyptologist. I still don’t, but at the same time, my interest in the Egyptology of the thirties, and in what Mary Chubb might have known or had access to, has extended somewhat as I have discovered more.
Recently BBC4 showed a documentary called The Man Who Discovered Egypt, so of course I pricked up my ears. When I realised that the presenter was the current director of the Egypt Exploration Society, Dr Chris Naunton (@chrisnaunton for the Twitterers among you), and his subject was Flinders Petrie, I made absolutely sure to record the programme so I could watch at my leisure. It was fascinating, and I may very well get further ideas for scenes on my edge panels from looking at it again.
For those in the UK that missed it and are interested, the programme is being rebroadcast on Tues 15 May at 10pm, on BBC4.
As it happens, Chris Naunton was the first person I spoke to at the EES when I started my research, so I emailed to say how much I’d enjoyed the programme. He replied, and added that the digitisation of the archive (which gave me the original picture for the Felucca, above) has been continuing apace. The EES now has its own YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL85556374907053C0&feature=plcp
Furthermore, some of the film shows JDS Pendlebury, the Director of Excavations in Mary Chubb’s time, not just working, but playing – organising a sports day for the worker’s children, having a spoof argument with colleagues – and, very importantly for me, there is film of an incident which is described in the book, of bringing back a heavily carved and coloured door-lintel from the site to the Expedition House. Whether I will be able to create a feasible embroidery design from that welter of imagery remains to be seen – but it will be really worth a try, won’t it!
Quick Update on The Map of Amarna
Fields Of Amarna
The cultivation on the Map of Amarna will take quite a while to do, but since I’m really quite happy with the progress it is making, I thought I would post a quick update on it.
The scatter of tête de boeuf stitches is as much as I have managed to do since I finally decided that that was the solution I was going to use. Granted, I’ve been working on a lot of other pieces at the same time, and sometimes I am simply not in the mood for single-stitch work, but it’s also more time consuming than you might expect. I’m trying very hard not to use a regular pattern of stitches – the scatter is as random as I can make it, given the human proclivity for pattern-making.
Since what remains to be done is about four times as much as I have done, I expect it will be quite some time before you see it again, but rest assured, I haven’t forgotten…
Dreams of Amarna – Progress on the Map
Progress On The Map of Amarna
You may recall that having worked most of the Map of Amarna, I then ran into a brick wall, and could not decide which thread to use for the last, rather extensive element – the depiction of the cultivation.
I decided, in the end, that I would use the more golden of the plain silk threads, but rather than spacing the stitches widely I would stitch quite densely, creating a sort of background pattern of tête de boeuf stitches. Then I began to worry that this would be visually too weighty and might even create the impression of a sort unlikely to be accurate given that in Mary Chubb’s time the villages were probably groups of smallholdings..
So instead, although some of the cultivation (on the eastern side of the river, running in a narrow band the length of the site) is worked in a single colour (or will be, when I finish it), the western side of the river will have some patches where the stitches are worked in one or other of the variegated silks.
Patches On The Map of Amarna
The close up shot shows one of those patches already in place, with the single colour on the other side of the river and the modern village in a different variegated thread.
Or at least I think it will. It would not be the first time I’ve had a bright idea that really didn’t work when I tried it. I am prepared for the possibility that I will have to unpick all the variegated threads and restitch in a single colour!
I am not alone. . .
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (picture from Wikipedia)
I recently had a trip to London, when I managed to fit in a brief visit to The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology as part of my background research for the Dreams of Amarna panels. Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie excavated at Amarna during the 1890s, finding and recording a fine painted pavement, since destroyed, of which Mary Chubb, who wrote the book which inspired the Dreams of Amarna project, would certainly have known. He also trained Howard Carter, whose discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb sparked the Egyptological fever that took hold in Europe and indirectly provided the impetus for Mary’s career.
I arrived late in the day, and really didn’t have much time to look around, but I did tell the lady at the desk why I was interested, and was rather startled when she said “Oh, then there is something you must see!” and took me to see it. It turned out to be a modern tapestry, woven at the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre in Saqqara (itself a place to set Egyptologists a-tingle) and named “Dahsur Lake” . The tapestry is very reminiscent of the Amarna style, full of life and colour, vigorous and joyful. The weavers produce their panels without sketches behind their looms, and I am astonished at what they have produced.
Clearly I am not alone in finding the art and story of Amarna inspiring. I wonder, will I produce something as good?
Dreams of Amarna – The Patches on The Map
After finishing the text and the villages on the Map, I need to decide what to use for the cultivation… You may recall from my earlier post that I have decided on the stitch I’m going to use – tête de boeuf stitch – but that I’ve not quite worked out what thread to use.
Trial Patches On The Map
I’ve stitched a variety of trial patches, using stranded cotton, flower thread, pearl cotton, and several different silks, and now all (all!) I have to do is make a decision. I’ve propped up the fabric in the living room and stand staring at it every chance I get!
So far, I feel sure I won’t be using the pearl cotton (too chunky) or the flower thread (also too chunky), but that leaves me two variegated silks (one pale green shading to pinkish purple and one brighter green shading to terracotta) and two plain silks (one slightly darker than the colour of the fabric, and one the same colour as the stranded cottons I used for the contour lines. I’ve tried very hard to get a photo that does reasonable justice to the various threads and colours, but I don’t think that the one I’ve got here helps very much…
Sorbello Stitch Village
I chose Sorbello stitches to represent the modern villages. These are worked at a very small scale, as you can see from the thread count. Again, had I followed the cartographer’s symbols, I would have used something like Jacobean Couching, but I felt that this stitch in fact reflects the idea of buildings rather better. I’ve used the same gold-shading-to-purple thread for all the modern villages, both the names and the associated areas. It doesn’t draw the eye, in real life, quite as much as you might expect.
Dreams of Amarna – Approaching The Final Decision on the Map
Map of the dig site at el-Amarna
You may recall that the first large element of the panels for Dreams of Amarna that I am stitching is a map of the site shown in Mary Chubb’s book.
It was easy to decide that I wanted to use reverse herringbone stitch for the contours of the high ground around the site, and unbroken lines of chain stitch for the Nile.
The compass rose and the titles were more difficult, although I made a decision eventually.
Now, however, I am near to finishing the text, and I can’t really put off my final decision any longer.
Areas of cultivation are shown on the original map using stars drawn roughly using four strokes. The obvious choice is to use Star Stitch, which exactly replicates the symbol used by the cartographer, but I don’t want to do that.
The aim of my stitching is not to reproduce a painting or a drawing, or even to reproduce those effects. I want to use embroidery techniques to produce impressions and effects that couldn’t be produced any other way, but that are inspired by the subject.
Tricky.
I finally settled on a stitch, after considerable thought and several hours leafing through my (never-ending shelf of) embroidery books – tête de boeuf stitch. But I’m still trying to work out what thread to use, and at what scale. So I’ve worked several test patches, and when I’ve finished the other stitching (the text and the villages), I’m going to wash and iron the whole thing and then sit back and look at them for a while…
Dreams of Amarna – More Research
This weekend I went to the exhibition “Tutankhamun – His Tomb and His Treasures” at the Museum of Museums near Manchester’s Trafford Centre. Partly just for fun, and partly because Mary Chubb mentions the huge excitement over Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb as some of the “social background”, if you will, in her book “Nefertiti Lived Here”. I was hoping to catch some of the flavour of that excitement as well…
Cloisonne Feather Pattern on the Sarcophagus
It was an excellent exhibition. The usual introductory hall, with panels describing ancient Egypt and the development of Egyptology, but this one also included a reproduction of the Rosetta Stone. I knew that one of the languages was hieroglyphic and the other was Greek, but I hadn’t quite registered that the third was demotic, which was the “workday” script of ancient Egypt, as it were. Then there were films about Tutankhamun, and about Howard Carter, and then we turned a corner and found ourselves face to face with a reproduction of the antechamber of the tomb, just as Carter would have seen it. There is a British Museum page showing one of the original photos here. Except that doesn’t begin to give you any sense of the impact, because nearly every item is covered in gold. It speaks volumes for the self-discipline of Carter and his colleagues that the whole affair did not degenerate into a snatch and grab. I was too startled and overwhelmed to take a photo at this point, although non-flash photography was permitted.
Although I knew, of course, that the tomb contained a mixture of Amarna-period pieces and later pieces, I wasn’t aware that the cloisonné on the middle sarcophagus (close-up above) was an explicitly Amarna period design. So maybe I need to do a small patch using that pattern.
I took quite a lot of photos, which came out, on balance, much better than I expected them to, and may even turn out to be interesting and useful.
The Hippo In The Shop
The Faience Hippo Finished
There was a short exhibition at the end which included some of Howard Carter’s watercolours – he was clearly a very fine archaeological artist and illustrator, and then we were sent out though the inevitable shop. Where I couldn’t fail to take one final photo…!
Still More Work on the Map of Amarna
Section of the Amarna Map
This photograph shows a completed section of the Amarna Map, which demonstrates most of the design choices I have made as I went along.
The long lines to the left in the picture are worked simply in Chain stitch and represent the Nile that runs beside the site. Small tête de boeuf stitches represent the cultivation, represented by hatched stars on the original map.
The text is worked in Back Stitch. It isn’t perfectly regular, but it isn’t really intended to be, either. I knew that all my favourite line stitches would be too heavy and detailed for the scale and the intention I have, so it is deliberately chosen to be as simple as I can make it.
Remember there will be areas competing for attention here and that what I want is a general impression that the viewer can then look at more closely if they want details.
There is at least as much again to do before the Map is finished – that’s why I have tagged this post “Perseverance”!