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Khmer Faces
I was guided through the many temples of Angkor, Cambodia
on the first week of the New Year 2001. I took photographs, wrote, and
sketched. I returned again during the rainy season, August 2002.
The thousands of dancing apsaras, gods, goddesses, and mythic beings
that grace the architecture have been carved from a proscribed set of
formulas. The carvings seem to embellish every possible surface, so that
the temple complexes appear as giant drip-castles in the distance.
We carve our likeness into stone as a testament, perhaps a prayer or
a shout in the face of death, because stone is permanent, enduring. Yet
the stones too go the way of the very beings that were cut from their
core. Their journey touches slower edges of time, but steadily, to the
earth again, they return, grain by grain.
I transferred some of these photographs onto handmade paper by scanning
them and printing them on a laser printer. I use them as extensions of
drawings in graphite and as elements of collage — ribboning through
a painted surface that evokes water or movement or patterns left by the
sedimentation process that causes sandstone to form.
— Mary Heebner, from journal notes, Cambodia,
and Santa Barbara, California
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