BA-KA (WAP #11; Egypt)

 Still with Luxor as our base, it was time to get out into the countryside & have a day trip to see the most intact of the ancient temples; Dendara.  This was the cult centre for the goddess of motherhood, love, music, dance & joy...the cow headed Hathor.

As a dairy farmer's daughter it was predictable that I'd be attracted to the ancient god with the cute cow ears, so you can imagine how excited I was to see beautiful Dendara, with it's huge columns and blue & white colour still visible in places.

 Having visited a few ancient sites already, we were beginning to become familiar with some of the characters & motifs appearing on the walls & columns.  Naturally we both started to have favourites, ones that we  immediately  recognised & were drawn to.  The Ba & Ka figures were one of my favourites....or two of my favourites!!

These two human-headed birds represented two aspects of the inner self.  The Ba was the Spirit, that left the body of the deceased & could fly on to the Spirit world.  Whereas the Ka was the Soul & destined to be earthbound.  It remained with the mummified body & took it's nourishment from offerenings left by relatives.

Although I am consistantly getting the two of them mixed up, I have always liked the imagery of the Ba & Ka as a visual representation of our spirit and/or soul so it was these that I chose as my inspiration for this week's art project.

 
When my children were younger we lived in the UK & whilst there my son collected the Horrible History series.  One of the magazines came with a set of Hieroglyph stamps & ...ahem....several years ago they made their way into my art supplies! 
This was the perfect time to use them to make a background!
I used the stamps to form the glyphs for Hathor, joy, music , love & motherhood.  It took rather a long time & it was very hot in my workroom at that time, so I abandoned the project until today, when temperatures have finally dropped to a more comfortable working climate!

 Before even starting to think of how I was going to compose elements into a design, I needed to draw the Ka to get an idea of proportion & placement.  I also experimented with how I wanted the wings to look. 
All through this period of visual note taking, I was also considering HOW I was going to achieve this using the contemporary reverse applique technique.

 Once a design was settled upon it was time to think about fabrics.
As I mentioned last week, I have a lot of scraps!  Although it had been challenging to only use scraps to 'colou' last week's project, I wanted to try it again this week too, so out came the blue bin. 

With Dendara having a blue & white colour scheme, it was natural that I choose these colours for my Ka.

 The most difficult fabric choice was for the background.  I'd not stamped enough hieroglyphs to have them across the whole background, so I needed something else that would allow the Ka to shine, but would still be interesting.
I chose a natural coloured hessian because of the texture of the weave.
Here's how the cutting back progressed...

 In my initial plan, this was the final outcome.
However, much as I loved the hessian background, it proved to be just a little TOO plain for my liking!
What to do????

 I opted to add another texture to it!
Instead of repeating the hieroglyphs, this time I made my own stamp from foam & added some long triangles to represent the rays of the sun god Amun.

Obviouly, it would look much better if I had added the triangles BEFORE stitching in the Ka then I could have achieved a more thorough coverage & consistent pattern.!  I'd chosen stamping because I thought it would be quicker, but I could just as easily have chosen to embroider triangles.
However, I am pleased with how this has worked out, & I'm particularly pleased with my little Soul-bird!
When my husband saw this, he complimented me on the hessian as a background as it reminded him of mummy wrappings.  He's right....and I can't believe I didn't think of that myself!!!  Maybe I did at a subconscious level!!!!
Regardless, this has been an engaging art exercise to start the month of March with. Cheers until next week!