The Tower of Babel
The Tower of Babel
Barbel Tower Story
Drawings section babel
In this mixed-media drawing, I explore a figure that stands at the crossroads of mythology, technology, and human aspiration. Using layered pastels, acrylics, and collage on paper, I wanted to create an image both enigmatic and symbolic — a nexus where old stories and new realities meet. The figure stands with arms outstretched, a posture that to me embodies openness, invocation, and a reaching toward something beyond.
Coiled around the figure’s head are three serpents, ancient symbols of wisdom, transformation, and guarded knowledge. They quietly evoke mythic archetypes of power and rebirth, linking the past with the present. The figure’s gaze turns deliberately to the right, suggesting a vision that looks forward — perhaps to an uncertain yet hopeful horizon.
The garment she wears unfolds like architecture — a towering skirt that calls to mind the Tower of Babel, one of humanity’s oldest tales about language, unity, and fragmentation. This tower rises sinuously across a winding hill, inviting us to reflect not just on its form, but on its meaning. Embedded within the structure are glowing computer screens — modern tongues of Babel — that light up the paradox of communication in our digital age. For me, these screens represent portals: ways we connect, converse, and build collective knowledge. Rather than sowing division, technology here becomes a means to rediscover unity.
Scattered delicately across the gown are fragments of newspaper text — shards of stories, voices, and information — floating like echoes from beyond the page. These fragments symbolize the fractured yet persistent flow of human narratives in today’s mediascape, reinforcing how our communication is both fragmented and deeply interconnected.
The vivid colors breathe surreal life into the piece, bridging myth and modernity. The serpents, the towering skirt, and the floating texts weave together a layered narrative that reinterprets the Babel story. Traditionally a warning about division and miscommunication, I see it as a hopeful meditation on how the internet and technology might serve as tools of understanding and empathy. Despite its flaws, the digital realm holds the promise to build a new kind of tower — a network of shared languages, stories, and meanings that transcend borders and barriers.
With this work, I invite viewers to reconsider this ancient myth through the lens of our contemporary lives, where technology can be a tool not of alienation but of profound human connection. The figure’s outstretched arms gesture to this possibility — a call to embrace the contradictions and complexities of our age with openness and creativity.
“The Towered Messenger” is more than an image to me — it is a visual manifesto, a poetic inquiry into how communication, identity, and community are evolving in the 21st century.