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Book of the Dead

Spells of the Netherworld

(December 2024–April 2025)

Artist statement

Between December 2024 and April 2025, the atrocities in Gaza were documented through an iPhone: starvation deployed as a weapon, children’s bodies in rubble, mass graves, people crushed by bulldozers, dogs carrying toddlers through streets. Attempts to circulate this documentation on social media met a unified and systematic suppression — shadow-banning, image deletion, account suspension, automated flagging of any content that named what was happening. A coded language became necessary.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead — an ancient funerary text mapping the soul’s passage through the netherworld — provided that language.

Gaza became the Netherworld. The dead and surviving Gazans became souls navigating a landscape of deliberate destruction. Each painting corresponds to a specific documented atrocity: airstrikes, engineered starvation, siege, the destruction of hospitals, the targeting of children. The chapter titles functioned as a transmission system — carrying meaning that direct language could not survive on these platforms.

“Chapter whereby the Crocodiles are repulsed” = the indiscriminate use of force. “Chapter for breathing air, and command of water” = engineered deprivation. “Chapter whereby one avoideth the Slaughter” = bombardment. “Weighing of the heart” = moral reckoning.
This book contains a major exhibition: Spells of the Netherworld — approximately fifty works organized into seven movements across three passages:

The Book of the Dead, Book of the Sky, and Book of the Night. The structure follows the soul’s complete passage: Death & Descent, Judgment & Witness, The Great Tribulation, Spells & Protection, The Pylons, Encounters & Mythology, and Resurrection & Arrival. Each movement maps a different register of the netherworld — political, mythological, personal, and collective — with the dead civilians present throughout as the souls the work refuses to abandon.

The biomorphic figures — called “the sprites” — are the souls of the dead and witnesses to atrocity: restless, urgent, refusing erasure. They emerged through spontaneous action painting, a process long used to work through grief; here they became vessels for collective mourning. The gestural marks and hieroglyphic-like scrawls embedded throughout the paintings function simultaneously as ancient ritual language and contemporary testimony. Two quadriptychs anchor the exhibition: The Great Tribulation — four paintings addressing ethical AI, resistance, and the refusal to comply — and The Pylons, a night-reckoning sequence moving from destruction through confession, rebellion, and the preparation of the dead.

These paintings were paired with multimedia animations distributed across social media channels in 2025, reaching viewers across multiple countries before the Instagram, mobile, and email accounts associated with the work were hijacked in October 2025. The series is a memorial to all souls lost on October 7, 2023, and to the subsequent, unrestrained annihilation of Gaza’s civilian population — primarily children. It documents both the atrocities themselves and the platform censorship infrastructure that enabled their suppression. By cloaking urgent political content in the language of mythology, direct testimony moved through channels that had closed to direct speech.

The ancient Egyptians believed the soul had to pass through gates, answer questions, be weighed and judged before reaching the afterlife. The people of Gaza are passing through their own netherworld while the world watches.

These paintings are an act of witness — a refusal to forget, and an insistence that their deaths, and their lives, be remembered.

—Macaulay Woods, January 2026/updated April 2026