THE GATHERING

The Gathering enlarges the playing piece of tawla (backgammon), the board game that has long given friends and families in Egypt a reason to sit together, into stacked forms of carved natural stone. Concentric rings drawn from the pieces are cut into each face, their precision set against irregular edges: the fixed rules of a game against the unpredictability of the people who play it. The work does not depict players. It looks at the game as a system, a set of shared rules through which people learn to wait, negotiate, compete, cooperate and belong, and through which that knowledge passes from one generation to the next. A game survives without a book to keep it; it lasts through practice, imitation and correction, changing each time it is taught. Stacked, each form rests on the one below and carries the one above, holding that sequence of generations vertically. Beside the pyramids, the sculpture sets two kinds of continuity side by side: knowledge made lasting in mass and stone, and knowledge that lasts only as long as someone keeps playing. Stone lasts by staying still. A game lasts because someone sits down and plays again.