In this fourth Series of the Land Memory paintings, the dialogue between the land and what is beneath the land has evolved to take on a more graphic arrangement of dualities. The depiction of various localities of land are detached into separate panels, each with its own pair of dualities, each becoming a shard into which one looks in on the land to see a separate piece of memory.

The first work in this Series is called Karm el-Meedan, and is a composite of 16 unstretched canvases that incorporates found objects including ceramic shards, bullet casings and barbed wire fragments. I found these objects while walking in Karm el-Meedan, located next to my family's home in Bint Jbeil, a field that my ancestors had farmed in generations past. I was walking around the field, kicking up dirt and rocks, when I suddenly saw the glistening color of a glazed object. I bent over to pick it up and found that it was a broken piece of old pottery. I kept walking and looking down into the dirt, and found that there were more pieces of pottery in the soil, some peeking slightly from the surface, easily discoverable, and some deep in the soil, which i found after digging into the earth. I spent quite some time looking and in the end was able to discover hundreds of pieces, of various sizes. Some had a distinctly familiar beige & reddish-brown pattern on them, such as on the drinking Ibreeq that most Lebanese have had in their homes at one time or another; but other pieces had more strange and curious patterns and colors, one particular lime green piece remains my favorite. I later discussed these pieces with my father, asking him why there were so many, and which time period he thinks they came from. He remembered that when he was a child in the village, it was common practice to dispose of broken pots and jugs by breaking them further into smaller pieces and throwing them back into the earth. Pottery was one of the few items of waste that human society created back then that did not degrade into the earth immediately, although its integration into the soil is not harmful, because it retains water and which it later releases back into the soil. (This is in strong contrast to the unfathomable amounts of toxic and non-bio-degradable waste that we create today, and heap into the earth or air or water, without the slightest apprehension or care.) So we surmised that the pieces of pottery must be approximately half a century old and more; this would would have been the last time my family had peacefully farmed their land in Bint Jbeil, before the advent of Israeli aggression which brought the ceaseless harassment of village life, eventually forcing the majority of people to migrate out of the village or out of the country. Along with the pieces of pottery, I also found the few bullet casings and pieces of barbed wire, remnants of war whose sounds still echo in our ears.

In the final stages of painting Karm el-Meedan, I began to realize that the land formations in the painting seemed a bit empty, as if they were awaiting some kind of additional element, such as the evidence of human existence on the land; the idea of incorporating the pottery and other found objects came as an afterthought. The fusion of actual objects from the land into the imagery of imagined land came together to complement each other in the finalized work.