Having heard a moving performance of the "Lamentations of Jeremiah" during the run-up to the Iraq war, I searched out the text, and noticed a footnote saying that this text was based on a very ancient one: "The Lamentations of Ur". Once the war began and the carnage continued to grow I was struck by the relevance of the Ur poem-- that these horrific events were taking place on the very same land and that very same land was again being burned and pillaged, and its inhabitants destroyed.

With some of the images in the text were imprinted in my mind, I determined to try and transform them into a visual vocabulary.

". . .The people mourn.
Its people’s corpses, not potsherds,
Littered the approaches.
The walls were gaping;
The high gates, the roads,
Were piled with dead.
In the side streets, where feasting crowds once gathered, jumbled they lay.
In all the streets and roadways bodies lay.
In open fields that used to fill with dancers,
The people lay in heaps.

The country’s blood now filled its holes, like metal in a mold;
Bodies dissolved – like butter left in the sun."

"Lamentations for the Destruction of Ur" from Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of the Mesopotamian Religion