Finding Artistic Focus in the Residue of Failure
At the beginning of 2026, I wanted to make a new series of collages, but I lacked a strong focus or unifying principle for the series. I knew a lot about what I wanted to do: I wanted to continue to use ink and charcoal on a variety of art papers as my raw materials; I wanted to work larger than my previous collage series; I wanted to evoke the effects of light on the landscape more explicitly than before. Those intentions could be enough for a respectable series—but I was hankering for something stronger.
The previous September, I visited Chicago and sorted through old art supplies in my storage unit. There I encountered two sheets of paper, printed with Egyptian hieroglyphs and overprinted in a long-ago exploration in gel plate technique. Forgotten artifacts of a failed experiment. With no purpose in mind, almost randomly, I put them into the pile to bring back to Panamá.
The following January, I was in my studio in Panama City and thinking about my projected series when I happened upon these sheets again. And I recognized in them the focus I was seeking.
A 3,400 Year Old Poem in Praise of the Light
These hieroglyphs were a transcription of the Great Hymn to the Aten. This long poem was written in the 14th century BCE by the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. Possibly the world’s first recorded monotheist, he addressed the sun disk, the Aten, as the sole deity.
The poem ascribes some un-sun-like actions to this deity: giving breath to the chick inside the egg; providing a “Nile in the heavens”—that is, rain—to far-away nations that lack a “proper” Nile to water their crops. Though written centuries earlier, Akhenaten’s Great Hymn to the Aten strongly resembles some of the biblical Psalms.
My academic training is in a later period of ancient history—the early Christian era—but I have long been intrigued by Akhenaten. His monotheism, given the political and cultural power of Egyptian polytheism, was both politically and theologically audacious.
But long before my doctoral program, as a little girl, I read and was enchanted by Lucile Morrison’s novel The Lost Queen of Egypt. This follows the growing up of Ankhsenpaaten, one of the six daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti; later she became Tutankamon’s wife. The novel paints a delightful picture of a child’s life in this devout royal household. Although Ankhsenpaaten’s fate is lost to history, Morrison imagines an escape from her later entrapment in court intrigue and a happy ending.
Akhenaten’s Great Hymn to the Aten itself is an act of careful, sustained observation of light and of the effects of light. Light pours across the natural and human-built realms without discrimination. It is the source of all life, knowledge, and purpose. Light’s absence, in the night, causes a restriction of activity, bringing dangers that the morning reverses. The praise here is based on close attention to the physical world, not abstractions. The poem is filled with vivid, concrete observations.
Hand-Crafting the Light in Layers: Contemporary Collage Techniques
My own series Hymn to the Sun is eight semi-abstract landscape collages, each 14″×11” (35.6 × 27.9 cm), on 300 lb (640 gsm) cotton watercolor paper. By principle, my collage work makes use of raw materials made by hand by me. Loose, scribbly landscapes in charcoal. Textures in ink on various papers, sheets covered with close-spaced dots formed with an ink-dipped cotton swab. Complex, branching, vegetative forms made by ink spreading on wet paper. Wax crayon rubbings taken from linocut plates I carved years earlier.
Pursuing light meant finding new capabilities in these familiar materials. I began to exploit the contrast between warm ivory papers and cooler whites to suggest the quality of light indirectly. Translucent papers, layered, convey atmosphere; the blue undertone of some black inks suggests the coolness of shadow. Strips of silk organza introduce subtle texture along with a different kind of translucency.
Each work incorporates fragments of the hieroglyphic sheets, as part of the visual texture of the collage surface. On the back of each sheet, in English, I wrote a related passage from the Great Hymn to the Aten.
The Sun’s Light on Remote Lands
My Hymn to the Sun series does not attempt to illustrate Akhenaten’s Great Hymn to the Aten. The landscapes that emerged, as I re-arranged my torn, hand-worked fragments, were not drawn from his world. Frozen rivers, alpenglow on mountain peaks, and winter wetlands were beyond his experience. Transient sensory phenomena—like the optical dazzle-spots that appear when the eye is overwhelmed by brilliant light—were just not talked about in antiquity (at least, not in texts that survive).
Rather, it was my own experience—already encoded in my prepared fragments—that emerged from the rearrangement and reassembly of those fragments. November days spent walking the dune-and-swale terrain near Lake Michigan. A visit to a mountain lake. The euphoria of a sunlit downpour in spring. And an interest in sensory processing and illusion that is distinctly contemporary. Climates strange to Akhenaten’s Egypt; conceptual filters unimaginable in the second millennium BCE.
Light Made New Each Day
As Jorge Luis Borges noted toward the end of his essay “Kafka and His Precursors,” each writer—and, I would say, each artist—creates their own precursors, inevitably reframing the past in the very act of being influenced by it.
What the old poem gave me was not so much subject matter as an orientation. A seed of guidance for my attention, reshaping my own past and future. Akhenaten was not concerned with either science or aesthetics: he was praising the Light, praising it with the full weight of theological conviction. My collages are not theological documents, but they are, I think, in the same tradition of careful, serious, even grateful looking. In this project, just the faintest wisps of something like a collaboration took shape. Across 3,400 years, a quest to understand what it could mean to praise the Light.
Availability and Online Exhibition Details
The original artworks in my Hymn to the Sun series are currently in Florida, in the possession of 33 Contemporary Gallery, and are available for purchase exclusively from that gallery via my artist profile on Artsy. You can also view the full series of eight artworks there, including detail and installation shots.
