Interpretation

Only a very few things are true for all people.

11 March 2019

For our Grade 8 unit on Interpretation, we looked to a great civilization of the ancient world for their ideas on what happens to us after we die. In answering this age-old question, for which many different answers exist across cultures today, the Ancient Egyptians too had an elaborate answer, filled with a fascinating cast of gods and monsters in a treacherous journey from death to the afterlife.

As we learned through this project, Ancient Egyptian art is rich with symbolism and is unique in the arc of global art history for having remained stylistically consistent for most of Ancient Egypt’s 3,000-year civilization. Many of the exquisite historical artefacts we can view at museums around the world reflect the culture’s decorated funerary religion and preoccupation with the trials and tribulations of the soul after death.

In their introduction to canopic jars, students were challenged to communicate form in quick, timed large-scale charcoal studies. Students learned that mummification was an important process for protecting the body whilst the soul was navigating the underworld, and embalmed viscera were kept separately in four canopic jars, named after the ancient Nile delta city of Canopus. The jars depicted each of the four sons of Horus, were represented by the heads of different animals, and were associated with one of the four cardinal directions and a protecting goddess.

Students also made drawing studies in their sketchbooks to better understand Ancient Egyptian beliefs of the afterlife, referencing historical images from The Book of the Dead depicting the Weighing of the Heart ceremony. It was at this ceremony that the determination was made for the soul’s final destination: the heavenly Land of Two Fields, or the stomach of an angry half-crocodile, half-hippopotamus named Ammut.

All this study was to contextualise students’ replica sculptures. Over the course of several weeks, they also learned and practised basic ceramic techniques, including both the coil pot and pinch pot techniques, rolling and kneading clay, attaching pieces together by cross-hatching and applying slip, and using various tools to manipulate clay.

As sculptors, my kids really got stuck in, and there was definitely a workflow across the studio. Below are their pieces after finishing them off!