An Interview with Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts, Joumana Medlej

Joumana Medlej is Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College for Michaelmas term. An artist-scholar from Lebanon, Joumana discovered her vocation for early Arabic calligraphy while assisting a master calligrapher in Beirut. She went on to specialise in these disused scripts, which she references as Kufi, from which she derived the visual language for her contemporary art practice. Through her own research, she developed an expertise in the art technology of the medieval Middle East. Having abandoned synthetic paints for traditional methods of colour-making, Joumana prepares her own art materials using historical techniques, often foraging for supplies. She draws on her experience as a practitioner to translate medieval Arabic handbooks, bringing the voices of past masters to a broader audience.

Here, Joumana tells us about Kufi and its enduring inspiration, and how she will spend her time at Merton. 

"Kufi, which is a family of scripts rather than a single style, is the first Arabic script that can be called calligraphic, which means it has a visual grammar, geometric consistency and set proportions in and between letters. Prior to this and up to the first copies Qur’anic manuscripts, there were only Arabic hands, in other words the individual handwriting of different scribes. But Kufi appeared around the year 700 and was the reigning Quranic script for three hundred years, when it began to be displaced by the later calligraphic tradition, the round scripts which live on today.

Kufi is closely associated with the Abbasid dynasty, and its use quickly spread east to Persian lands and west to North Africa and Andalusia. The logic of the script permits a lot of creative variation within the parameters of the characters, so regional styles developed. At the same time, vocalisation systems were tried and adopted unevenly; it took a long time to arrive at the standardised system the modern Arabic reader is accustomed to. Reading texts from that period requires me to be aware of the different conventions. For instance, one Andalusian inkmaking text I translated featured not only the Maghribi convention of dots being used differently, but also arabicised Greek, Latin and even Spanish words. Subsequent scholars’ interpretation of these texts over the ages has sometimes assumed that different spellings are misspellings, replacing these adoptions with ‘orthodox’ Arabic words in such a way that the text could no longer be made sense of. For this reason I avoid all editions and translations and go straight to surviving manuscript copies to see the original for myself. 

I first became interested in Kufi as a script because of its visual interest and plasticity – its different iterations can be either handwritten or constructed with a ruler and compass. It’s now indecipherable to most readers of modern Arabic: it’s really quite unique. From there I was drawn to look into the art materials of the same period, which opened up a whole other area of research. What keeps me interested – whether in Kufi or in inkmaking– is that hardly anyone else is looking into this in this depth or making it accessible it to a general public. Medieval art technology from Europe is well explored but hardly anyone is looking into the Middle East in the same period. So my research is largely uncharted territory, and this is exciting for me as an artist. What I find out from my research is also useful to people. For instance, before coming to Merton, I was collaborating with The Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East, adding my practitioner’s experience to their work on dating and placing early manuscripts through studying different Kufi styles.

I was pleased to share one of the more accessible aspects of my work with the Merton community in a talk earlier this month. The talk was on the preparation of the pigments and dyes that made up the Islamic scribe’s colour palette. I use these in my work, along with paints and inks made from foraged rocks, soils, and plants. Beginning the creative process by transforming raw materials is part of my work process, which is also my spiritual practice; I also see it as working hand-in-hand with the Earth. 

The talk was well received and nearly all places for the follow-up workshops later this month have been taken up. In the first workshop, the participants will be making black inks, and in the second, we’ll work on making red inks. The participants will be able to take the inks away with them to use on their own projects. 

With all that, calligraphy and art materials are not the end product of my work, but only components of the conceptual or research-based art pieces that make up my practice. The end goal of my visiting fellowship is to create an artist book on an ambitious topic, which is Time. I have sketches scattered through a number of sketchbooks, made along the years as I tried to approach this topic before without ever having sufficient space to get anywhere. I spent my first month here researching all sorts of time systems, medieval timekeeping and time theories. I’ve learnt many surprising details – for instance, there are five types of months in the lunar calendar, one of which was known as ‘draconian’, referencing the dragon which ate the moon during a solar eclipse. The science is complicated, which is why there are so many different calendars and no way to create an ‘ideal’ system. However, through art, I can work with a platonic version of solar time as we experience it: platonic in the sense of ‘the ideal’. Merton College will have the original copy of this book, fully handmade, once it is completed, though I hope to derive a limited edition of semi-handmade reproductions for other institutions (or collectors) to enjoy." 

To find out more about Joumana’s work, view Joumana's gallery and publications.