I hang my pride on my sense of direction and ability to handle extremes. I felt alive in the maze-like corridors of the Medina, 111°F/44°C beating down as I pretend to know which way is up. The heat is brilliant, it's thick through your throat, heavy settling with dust on your brow and slowing of pace in a setting that has already been stilled by time. A place delayed by centuries to give a moment of reflection into what felt like biblical times. With the heat comes darkness. Shade. The only reprieve; deep crevasses below overlapping fabrics and tarps patchworked and concealing you in the veins of the dry city. Folds of fabric encompassing the whites of eyes that depict a man in a doorway, and women with their gaze down.
As we twisted around these streets, pretending to be determined only so we'd stop being stopped, I was looking for the next artwork. Overwhelmed with options but simultaneously wanting to veer from the obvious, the tea, the mosaics, the craft in all its beauty. I bought some small tea glasses, I was intending on drawing them with the sunlight striking low and setting a colored long shadow. When I got home and unwrapped them, it wasn't the glasses that spiked my heart rate - it was the newspaper that enveloped them. The local Moroccan Arabic black and white newspaper. Browned, as everything in that town is, I assume from the dust; browned to the hue of Marrakech. Delighted by the motion of this unwrapping, I thought then of the figs that hung by a seldom tree just outside our Riad. When our host first welcomed us, he had picked some and released them from a wrapped serviette to offer us. I've recreated that welcoming gesture. Welcoming the viewer into my experience of the maze in the medina, the heat of a foreign place, the delights of another time, another world, another culture. Marrakech.