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Detail image of traveller wandering Arabian desert

Artists & Books

A Gardener at Midnight: Travels in the Holy Land

Peter Lyssiotis

2004


Peter Lyssiotis (1948-) is a photomonteur and creator of A Gardener at Midnight: Travels in the Holy Land, in which he revisits the ways Western travellers have traditionally recorded their encounters with the Holy Lands and their peoples.

Central to this project are the Library's holdings of European travellers' tales of these 'exotic' destinations.

Produced within the context of the war in Iraq and the Middle East as a site of ongoing conflict, A Gardener at Midnight re-imagines the journey described in David Roberts’ The Holy Land: Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia (1842-49) as a journey across post-war Iraq.

Sitting on shifting ground, somewhere between fact and fiction, A Gardener at Midnight presents two fabulist texts accompanied by ‘unreal’ images. Details surrounding their authorship are deliberately kept mysterious.

Lyssiotis’ work also references the scale and production methods of Roberts’ and other European travel books in the Library’s holdings. 

There are only 10 copies of this limited edition ‘deluxe elephant folio’.