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The beginning: a two-pronged trigger received from Tim and Georgia Riley. A recording and an object. A doubling, two ideas pulling and pushing against each other, vying for space in my mind.

The repetitive, strange, and strangulated voice of the recording triggered thoughts touching on memory and locality: and things we don’t yet know, nuggets and layers of history.

The object was a latex covered book which denied its interior by being sealed in rubber. Only a single, blocked out word was revealed through the cover, both disclosing and remaining hidden simultaneously. Was I meant to see what was inside?

Hey Jude: The Valley of Dry Bones takes as its starting point a photograph taken in the Judean desert. A departure from the single image followed as I added ideas and images to the initial (play)ground, playing with ideas of nuanced Hebrew lettering, biblical ideas, youth, regeneration, decline, and death. The Hebrew text spells out the word Judea, the final letter turning into the final letter of Judith, a transposition of the desert, and the root of my name. This echoes the single word on the front of the latex covered book given to me: does it spell out a name?

The two photographs within the image refer to the duality of the naming of Judah by his father Jacob on his death bed, as quoted in Genesis. Jacob called him a lion whelp because he will become a lion, the King of beasts, but as yet he was still a cub. Youth represented by twins ( carrying through the repeated pattern of doubling,  which I was initially confronted by) is present, as is old age.

Transferred onto the cloth, the images are transformed into a double of the prayer shawl, a tallit: but also, in this scattering of enigmas and doubles, maybe a shroud, a covering of death.

The fragments I passed on to Joanna Hill were a continuation of my own investigation into memory. A piece of fabric, a found object in a cemetery, a yamulke, a prayer hat that had been crushed. Who did this beautiful velvet and gold covering belong to? Why had it been abandoned at the cemetery?  An object for use in prayer, discarded and mutilated, denying its use. And a recording, T.S. Eliot's own reading of The Waste Land, just a fragment of the poem exploring the displacement of European people. A voice of insistence of the German origin of the speaker, a meditation on the seasons, and a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to a journey into a desert waste.