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Brian Lalor
Title: A peri at the hanging gardens of Samarra
Size: 30 x 50 cm
Medium: Etching and Aquatint with Rouletting and Cutout
In A peri at the hanging garden's of Samarra a number of related ideas
come together. My interest in the idea of the garden in eastern culture
comes from the personal experience of living in the Middle East. In the
Palestinian refugee camps of Gaza, no house however poor is without its
life-sustaining patch of cultivated ground. In even the tiniest shanty
courtyard, dates, lemons, olives, grapes and melons grow and give sustenance
and beauty to the beleaguered population. In arid lands, the oasis is a true
garden of earthly delights in a manner inconceivable in the lush west; many
villages can be identified by the outline of their cypress trees on the
horizon, holy men's tombs by the shade of a single overarching carob tree.
The hieratic figure derives from Sassanian reliefs and represents a peri, a
supernatural being in Iranian mythology, descended from the fallen angels.
Samarra is north west of Baghdad, noted for the extraordinary Manaret
el-Malwiya, the spiral minaret, one of the earliest minarets in the Muslim
world, and a little known wonder of the creative imagination.
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