About This Artwork

“Poetry is the innocence of being”, as Holderlin said.

For me poetry is the word of beginning, the word of fertility and inspiration.

As I was fascinated by Adonis’s poem “Petra Tablet”, I started working on drawings that emerged from the climate of the poetic text and embraced its words.

Being a sculptor, haunted by the love of stones, I found the moment of encounter between myself and this poem to be Adonis’s phrase:

“Say the stone is haunted by the Mysterious”

For many years I continued to create drawings, exercising the pleasure of rewriting the phrases I loved in calligraphy, turning them into part of the composition of my drawings such phrases as:

“Carried by you to the early days of creation,

That were washed in the Jordan River,

I enter with you a world that extends between stone

And its brother man,

With no boundaries but the air and the light.”

So these drawings are an attempt to communicate with the poem, they don’t explain or illustrate, but try to embellish a dialogue with the poetic text, through which I discover also my own lines and forms.

My entire artwork comes from a poetic memory, I consider drawing and sculpture as an incarnation of poetry.

These drawings are a homage of love for Adonis, as a poet, a friend and a source of inspiration.

Mona Saudi