Sensing The Word

By the time his mother died in 1998, Wosene Worke Kosrof was already an internationally established artist known for his inventive use of the Amharic script. However, the intimacy of the written word was brought home to him when his mother learned, in the late years of her life, to write her name. Watching her discovery, her play with the letters and delight in their beauty, renewed his own attachment to script, not just for his art, but as a deeply resonate form of cultural memory.

“My mother learned to read a little at the end of her life. She had always known the beauty of the letter, but when she learned to sign her name, they really came alive. That assured me, to see my mother so close to writing, and it made me think how script had always been - familiar. She told me the characters were dressed up, some in nice clothes, they reminded her of eucalyptus or oak trees; or maybe she saw animals in them. This affected me deeply. When I gave my mother a canvas and asked her to write, she replied, “But I don’t know how to”. No, you do, I said. Take a few colors. But she took black. She drew the letters she knew and liked and kept repeating and repeating them. Then she started to distort them, to break them up. I asked her what she was thinking, “its like a dream”, she said… Abstraction is a dream world - broken pieces coming together, creating new layers of reality. Because of my mother I’ve become even more fascinated in the deep play of the words; and as my life changes they tell my experience… they go back in time and they move forward. They travel with me”.* And so does his mother. Breaking with Ethiopian tradition, Wosene has taken a middle name - Worke; it is his mother’s name. (Allyson Purpura, Ph.D. Independent Curator, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2006)

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