Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan (born 1925 in Beirut, Lebanon) is a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. Adnan's life is a study in displacement and alienation: daughter of a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father, she grew up speaking Greek and Turkish in a primarily Arabic-speaking society. Educated at French convent schools, French became the language in which her early work was first written but she has studied English from her youth, and most of her later work has been written in this language. Caught between languages, in her youth Adnan took refuge and found liberation from this conflict through painting rather than writing. In 1996 she recalled: "Abstract art was the equivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words, but colours and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression."

Adnan divides her time between San Francisco, Paris, Beirut and her home on the island of Skopelos where The Garden in Skopelos was made. The expandable book is one of the artist’s many black ink studies made on Japanese folded paper. The swiftly drawn black landscape is Adnan’s response to the natural environment on the island made while observing the context around her home. These book-drawings are something that she makes in both Greece and San Francisco (where her home is also situated outside of the urban context) and the use of the Japanese folded paper and ink recalls the tradition of Asian calligraphy (as well as referring to an Arabic tradition of this form).