Unsettled Histories deploys Rembrandt’s The Three Crosses (1653) intaglio print as a departure point to realign the timelessness of his religiously inspired original with the timeliness of contemporary socio-political struggle in the settler-colonial context of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Western art presents itself as God given, timeless and immutable. In contrast, my project advances the potential latent within the work by moving the narrative forward in time through erasure; drawing on top of the original work with diverse imagery which shows the instabil-ity of occupation to produce a series of 40 prints. I began by creating a copper plate of the exact size of Rembrandt’s print through photo-etching. I then drew on top of the plate creating new layers, making ghost-like images of the previous state in the background. My new images appear to pro-gress in time but are always within the same landscape, somewhat similar to time-lapse photography. My work depicts changes in the landscape both real and fantastical: a pile of dogs, a flood, over-grown nature, changing buildings and the activities of humans. The new images propose forgotten or overlooked narratives through a break with historical continuity. The project is driven by the mediums of printmaking and drawing because they provide a unique material manifestation of variation, erasure, and layering as an opportunity to consider the idea of open-endedness and the idea of con-tingency, that which is fleeting and fragile.
