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Book of the Dead

(December 2024–April 2025)

“We now return our souls to the creator,
as we stand on the edge of eternal darkness.
Let our chant fill the void,
in order that others may know.
In the land of the night,
the ship of the sun,
is drawn by the grateful dead.”

For the people of Gaza, Sudan and Congo who are currently experiencing the horrors of war and engineered famine.

Artist statement

Between December 2024 and April 2025, I watched the atrocities in Gaza unfold through my iPhone — starvation used as a weapon, children's bodies in rubble, mass graves, people crushed by bulldozers, dogs running through streets with toddlers in their jaws. I tried to document what I was seeing on social media, but there was a unified wall that was systematically censoring content about Palestine — shadowbanning posts, deleting images, suspending accounts, flagging anything that named what was happening — so I created a coded system to continue documenting what I saw.

I turned to the Egyptian Book of the Dead — an ancient funerary text mapping the soul's journey through the netherworld — and used its chapter titles as cover. Gaza became the netherworld. The Gazans became souls navigating a landscape of deliberate death. Each painting corresponds to a specific atrocity: airstrikes, starvation, siege, the destruction of hospitals, the targeting of children. The chapter titles from the Book of the Dead allowed me to reference these horrors without triggering automated content moderation.

"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. The biomorphic figures I call "the sprites" are the souls of the dead and the witnesses to atrocity — restless, urgent, refusing erasure. They emerged through spontaneous action painting, a process I've used to work through personal grief, but here they became vessels for collective mourning. The gestural marks, the hieroglyphic-like scrawls embedded in the paintings, function as both ancient ritual language and contemporary testimony.

I paired these paintings with multimedia animations, and the work reached thousands of viewers across multiple countries before my account was hijacked and fell silent in October 2025. This series is a memorial, an archive, and evidence. It documents both the atrocities in Gaza and the platform censorship that enables it. By cloaking urgent political content in the language of mythology, I was able to speak when direct speech was being silenced. The ancient Egyptians believed the soul had to pass through gates, answer questions, be weighed and judged before reaching the afterlife. The Gazans are passing through their own netherworld while the world watches and does nothing.

These paintings are my attempt to bear witness, to refuse forgetting, and to insist that their deaths — and their lives — are remembered.

—Macaulay Woods, January 2026