Haptics: Gold Book II

Tavşanli  Kalise
Capadocia, Turkey

A Counterfacing Double-Decker Accordion Fold

3 5/8” x 9 1/4”

3 1/2” X 4 1/2” for six panels on each level; three drawings per level. 

Text & Photographs, verso

Haptic drawings created inside the hermitage of an ancient cave church in Capadocia, Turkey. Site photographs and an interpretive prose poem inform panels on the reverse sides.

….One is drawn to the Church by the power of stone. On entry, one notices an enormous Cross carved into the ceiling’s low dome. The width and length of its arms arc from entry to apse and side to side, as if to embrace all who pass beneath it. The site feels haunted. The large niches for icons of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are empty, the images either stolen or destroyed. Pale red outlines surround each niche, an insistent reminder of the Saviour’s sacrifice.

 One speaks. One repeats one’s name over and over again. The voice echoes against the rock. One’s entire body absorbs the vibrations, the clarity and resonance of its sound, its purity. The external cave and the cave of ones body become one and the same. One stops to imagine the voices of the priests who once consecrated this space, the enactment of liturgy, the hymns, the articulation of the Eucharist. One’s own voice resurges, a stream that explores melodies, harmonies, chants. The nonsense of early childhood verse. The echoes. One stops. Silence again. Within the slant of light through the cut rock door, one opens the blank accordion fold. The pens one brings in all their various colors begin to rise, to perform, to transfigure. Calling out the ghosts. Mark by mark, the conjunction of stone and song.  Why does one enter the vestiges of an ancient Church to draw, progressing stroke by stroke, panel by blank panel? An alchemy behooves us.

— Stephen Vincent