We need to talk about Gaza…
The Ruler (2021)©️ Sarra Shepherd All Rights Reserved.
This work was initially attempted in 2021 and was followed by 2 further attempts with the final image as pictured above.
The origins of the work began after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Paris. I couldn’t understand it… I really couldn’t. I knew how offensive visual depictions of Mohammed were and how this was set against French values and beliefs around freedom of speech… but I couldn’t understand the news coverage relating to the conflict between France and the Middle East.
I was fiddling with a chinagraph pencil at the time.. the kind of pencil used to map mark. After much research, reading about the conflict and reflecting on the British involvement in the evolution of the tensions there (I apologise if I have misunderstood anything as I researched within the limitations of my personal origin as a British citizen.. I tried to apply fair and balanced judgement as a researcher).
I began with the Sykes Picot agreement, in which land was divided between the British and the French. What struck me was how the land was divided using a straight ruler across clearly mountainous regions. What this meant was that people who were naturally divided by terrain were artificially divided by a straight rule. Sykes and Picot… Rulers from outside the region misunderstood… (whether deliberately or not) that these people with different cultural, political, social and religious values and beliefs) were to be forced into conflict with each other.
To represent this notion of rule, I used a chinagraph pencil to draw a map of the region using the original map that would have been used at the time, and holding a rule over the line. The image depicts crops and the water lines of the region to illustrate the fertility and abuse of the land.. an origin of civilisation.
Below are some of the development images for the work which hopefully explains the process as I have written it.
The Sykes-Picot agreement is only part of the full story of tension in the Middle East which is incredibly complicated and very much worth trying to understand as it tells us a lot about war, conflict, intolerance, greed and human nature.
