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Where does the sun go when it sets every evening? And how can it reappear completely refreshed the following morning? What processes did it have to go through? And if the sun itself must go through this every night, what are the implications for us? According to Egyptian Mythology, Ra traveled across the sky every day in his solar bark, and then he journeyed all night on his nocturnal bark through the Amduat. These paintings follow the path of Ra in his night bark as laid out in the Amduat.

At the beginning of the New Kingdom, during the early 18th Dynasty, the sacred text of the Amduat appeared in the royal tombs of Ancient Thebes, and for the first time ever, it was an illustrated text. Divided into twelve distinct hours, the text and illustrations work together to document the progress of Ra in his night bark as he sails through a mysterious land. Each hour is introduced and usually placed in a context which is given a name, and every god or goddess, person, serpent or strange creature are also named as well as depicted performing some action.

The word Amduat is difficult to translate precisely, but it seems to embrace all the attempts that have tried to capture it; the netherworld, the secret chamber, the twilight zone… but one thing is certain, it takes place by night, and so it passes through darkness towards the re-emergence of a renewed light.

Following the analogy of the Sun’s miraculous rebirth each morning, the Amduat describes a metaphysical journey towards our own rebirth through another world. Being reborn requires re-entering the womb, but not that of the human mother. It occurs through the greater womb of the earth, and the deep tunnels leading to the sacred, hidden chambers cut deep into the rock below the Mountain of the West symbolize the ritual journey of the sperm towards the divine ovum, its period of gestation, and its rebirth passing out through the very same passage.

Due to their metaphysical nature, the paintings in this series are abstract, and follow the path laid out in the Amduat and express some of the conditions Ra is exposed to during his travels.