A throw rug or heavy blanket embroidered by women of southern Iraq. Abstracted gardens are depicted in a variety of designs that resonate back to the very beginnings of agriculture. I have carried this Samawah throughout my exile. It is my very real island of gardens. I am only one of its dreams and the nightmare is the destruction of its heartlands. I think of the women and the stories their hands have created. My Samawah humbles me with its creative expression of fertility. Amongst Iraqi artists the Samawah rug is a foremost inspiration.

When my daughter, Riyam, was four years old at a time when we lived in Morocco she decide that she would like a nest. Asking me to place the Samawah inside her little inflated plastic swimming pool she began to arrange her nest. Her best friend, a little American girl called Tsahai visited her and together they began to formulate a whole fantasy world in and around the nest. On her next visit she brought with her a classic old American patchwork quilt that her mother had made. The Samawah and quilted blanket together creating a snug nest for the two girls to play in and remains with me as stories and tales yet to be told.

The stone is lime from Yemen. When wetted with water there comes a narrative of a scent and the fondest of memories. The narrative of freshly moistened clean, dry hot Earth. The colour of this stone is the colour of the southern Iraqi earth. the colour of the martyrdom of Hussein in Kerbala and of the dust that settled down after an explosion I witnessed and survived. The stone is square and cut like a tile, like the paving stones of the zigguret tower. It is flat like the south of Iraq. It is a platform. A point between here and an infinite horizon.

The model of a reed bundle boat was given to me (1977) by an Armara (South American) Indian from lake Titicaca high up in the Andean Mountains of Bolivia. He gave it to me in Qurna at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphratus River where along with 22 Marsh Arabs and an international crew from nine nations we were building a real version of this boat. The expedition was led by Thor Heyerdahl and the boat was called the "Tigris". So this little model boat represents the narrative both of an ocean voyage and a cultural narrative that spans the Earth. The narrative of Reeds and water and of the indigenous structures that history is forgetting and the sustenance of hope that we may yet remember. The crescent shaped boat has been found depicted everywhere including the Sahara and Easter Island. The reed bundle was the emblem of Eridu and the first cities of Iraq.