Children of Yam

In this series of work, paper is seen as the land we find ourselves standing on and the ink the forces driving us out of our lands. Together, the paper and ink are the record of events. We stand on pages with stories from the past, pages we cannot open, a book of stories we cannot read, a document of lessons we cannot learn from.

Children of Yam explores these notions through the fictional story of Yam, the forgotten fourth son of the biblical and Quranic character Noah. Yam refused to climb onto the Ark and chose instead to seek refuge on a mountaintop. Though vilified in the religious narrative for disobeying his father’s commands, Shono saw in him a figure who turned down doctrine and trusted in himself and his free will. Fear of death did not drive him into the safety of his father’s faith. To that end, the artist assumed that Yam survived the deluge and that his children became the refugees of the world, forever fleeing floods. His story, and the story of his lost children, is a story of immigrants through time: the forgotten, the inked over, the displaced. Shono draws our attention to the fact that though some of us are sedentary, we too were once,and again will be, displaced.