When the drought reaches the valley, the stories replace the river.

—Etel Adnan, Seasons

 

In the summer of 2023 on a trip to Yerevan, I visited the Matenadaran museum of Armenian manuscripts. Included in their collection are a series of beautifully illuminated ancient Armenian maps from the 10th century. I turned to one of the maps in particular, a humble and geometric sketch by a Persian cartographer, depicting the twin peaks of Mount Ararat and the Taurus Mountains, the surrounding Araks River painted a vibrant blue. It tells stories of the country’s shifting border changes, landscapes and scale preceding its current small landlocked state, the circumference of its borders resembling a girl with her hair braided tightly to the back. 

 

In an effort to communicate these unspoken and in-flux histories, I created a series of embossed prints sans ink, produced by sinking impressions onto a page that echo the map from the Matenadaran. Through layering and scanning multiple etchings atop one another, I looked to imitate water’s path as it runs across the same sediment over and over again, as it forms divots and shapes through riverbeds and stone. These layers are meant to gesture toward movement and change, held in visual opposition to any conception of crisp, finalized, resolute or clean borders. As if a distant memory, the river that was once drawn so clearly is now distant and hazy, a map of a map, an imprint of water.

 

the memory of the water is ever-present

in its absence

an ancient map of a map that no longer exists

too

       manages to leave its stories behind