Materials, preparing a work, and showing it

This lesson asks you to try out materials and techniques, to prepare your art works for showing, and to understand the different ways a work can be presented to reach an audience. The museum offers two cases from the Islamic world: the materials of a tiled mosaic, and the places where a calligrapher's work was shown and signed. Making and presenting your own art works is for your class. ¹

Choose one material from the records. Ask what is done to it before it becomes part of the work, and which of your own materials could be handled in a similar way.

List the settings the record names. For each, ask who would see the work there, and what you would add or leave out of a piece meant for it.

Rexford Newcomb quotes Jean Gallotti's picture of the lanes of Fez. A house going up is betrayed by a gravel of chips of coloured glazed terracotta, the debris of zellij. The courtyard rings with the steel hammers of the tile-setters trimming their pieces ². Newcomb adds that the Arabic and Kufic inscriptions on the borders of panels are made from whole glazed tiles, usually black. The inscription is laid out, and the surface round the letters is cut through the glaze to the terracotta with chisels or sharp hammers. This leaves black letters on a terracotta ground, a process demanding great skill ^{3 4}.

Who made a piece of writing, and who could sign it? The calligrapher's record gives the craft's own answer. A pupil was licensed once he had copied a piece by an old master chosen by his teacher, and the licence gave him leave to set his signature beneath his writing ⁵. A signature usually opens with ketebehû, "he wrote it". Practice pieces are signed meşekahû, "he practised it", and copies kalledehû, "he imitated it" ⁵. The Encyclopaedia of Islam adds that leading calligraphers often drew models on paper for inscriptions made in other materials ⁶.

Suppose a calligrapher draws the model on paper and a tile-setter cuts the letters out of black glaze. Who should be called the maker of the inscription, and what is the strongest objection to your answer?

• Zellij: the tile mosaic of Morocco, and how inscriptions are cut into black tiles.
• The calligrapher: licence, signature and the forms in which the work was shown.
• Islamic calligraphy: how inscriptions in stone, stucco, ceramic and metal relate to the hand on paper.

Read the records of Zellij and Calligrapher. Make a table with three columns: material, how it is prepared, where the work is shown. Add a row for a piece of your own.