Agreement and progress

It was a pleasantly warm morning in September, and the studio annual general meeting had just finished. It had gone well and the artists were all happily gathering around coffee and cakes. We had all agreed that progress had been made and everything was going well.

An artist said, “ Have you seen this news?”

The pitch of her voice made us all stop and stare.

The news

“What a terrible accident!” said another.

“It’s a terrorist attack!” said the Israeli sculptor rushing from her studio with her phone.

“It can’t be.” said a chorus from the artists.

“She is right. She knows.”  I thought. We had both come from places where dreadful things happened but from that morning the whole world changed. As soon as it became clear the planes had been deliberately flown into Twin Towers of New York, the mood in the studio altered and most of us decided to go home.

Destroyed

I set off on my short walk to my flat, walking down the same street on the opposite pavement was a young woman, an artist also. She had come to the studios to see if she could join our artists community but as the AGM was taking place she hadn’t been seen. I hadn’t spoken to her because I had been busy with admin after the meeting until the Twin Towers news broke. As we walked, we smiled hesitantly at each other, but my heart filled with sadness. I knew she would not come back to our studios again. She was a Muslim wearing a headscarf. The planes that crashed into the Twin Towers in New York had smashed right through our studios too. The artists wouldn’t have blamed her personally. She would have been accepted and offered a studio, but the dust and smoke  and debris of the Twin Towers had begun its killing of all of us.

Horror Show

Back in my flat, my daughter and I watched the TV news  again. This time as the plane flew into the Tower I screamed. My daughter told me not to be silly. We were both trapped in the realisation of unreal reality. My ex-husband, Mike, had flown into New York very early that morning and immediately taken a local flight to Philadelphia so we assumed he was safe.

The Twin Towers

Many years earlier Mike and I had visited the Twin Towers as tourists. They were barren buildings, grey, and dismal, that sucked bitterly cold swirling winds around them. The elevators that sped up to the roof were metal coffins. The view was of a monstrous inhuman future city world by dark waters. I longed to put my feet on the ground. Nothing suggested that the Towers might contain living, breathing, warm people dressed in bright colours who had lives and families.

Nairobi and Dar es Salaam Bombings 1998

Three years earlier Bin Laden arranged for the bombings of the American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. 224 people were killed and over 4000 injured. The number of American deaths was 12. Bin Laden cared nothing for Africans some of whom would be Muslims. It is not evident that the USA cared about the African deaths either.

raɪts

I was angry and I was upset by the bombings and afraid too. Eventually I began work on five large paintings that altogether are titled /raɪts/. I chose the title Rights, Rites written in the phonetic alphabet because the words sound the same but have different meanings. We have a right side to our bodies. We perform rites. We have legal rights. We write our stories. I exhibited these paintings in the Leper Chapel, Cambridge in 2005.

The first painting is “Oppression”, the second is “Resistance” the third, “Education”, the fourth “Action”, and the fifth is “Liberation”. The paintings offer no answers, they only ask questions.