Aramaic Incantation Bowls and Contemporary Ceramic Art Practice

This research investigates connections between the Aramaic incantation bowls, contemporary ceramic art practice, and critical theory. Scholarly attention surrounding the Aramaic Bowls remains largely confined within the philological disciplines of translation, linguistics and grammar. In contrast, through critical and creative approaches, this research takes an interdisciplinary approach, establishing connections between the fields of ceramics, archaeology, ancient history, Jewish studies and critical theory, to enlarge ways of viewing and understanding the bowls, advocating a more prominent position for them within ceramic historical traditions. Aramaic incantation bowls from 5th-7th century CE Iraq are clay bowls inscribed with magical texts. Made from clay and found buried upside down in the floors and courtyards of Babylonian homes, they are fundamentally concerned with protecting inhabitants, invoking a plethora of supernatural beings from across cultures to assist in this endeavour.
Research focuses on a material investigation of these artefacts through the realisation of a large-scale art installation In the House of Ephra and Bahmanduch. Comprising a triptych of immersive room-scapes, each space registers the physical and psychological disturbance evidenced by the bowl texts and re-imagines the decorative fabric of the Babylonian domestic interiors in which bowls were typically unearthed. The application of contemporary literary, critical and theoretical approaches to the bowl texts, and the compilation of an Aramaic bowl chart to facilitate their close analysis, have enabled their reconsideration. This creates a synthesis that has not previously been undertaken, uncovering affinities between emergent ideas within the late antique texts and the critical approaches of Mieke Bal, Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Karen Barad, Gaston Bachelard and others to reveal new insights. In addition the research broadens out heritages of meaning carried by clay as an art medium, unearthing wider narrational landscapes implicit in the bowl texts and praxis, introducing new types of narratives and art works to contemporary ceramics.