The Seraph Hunter Cosmos · Character Plates
Hatshepsut
twelve plates
A face carried through three worlds. Painted from life-study sheets, lighting tests and scene plates — the same woman in a painted hall, a dressing station, and somewhere that is not Earth.
Plates by Saskia van Heemskerck · Blue Bunniekins Press · MMXXVI
Egypt
Eight plates
The Gilded Cage
A hall built at the scale of a god, and one small figure kneeling at the far end of it. The room is the subject; she is what the room is for.
The Mask
Kohl, a bronze mirror, one candle. The face in the glass is already finished; the face doing the work is not.
The Presence
Morning through the clerestory. She stands in it and waits to be looked at — the shot framed past two dark shoulders, so we watch her being watched.
The Golden Chair
Seated. A soldier in a red cloak folded to the floor in front of her. Her hands are the calmest thing in the frame.
Every Inch
Arm out, mouth open, the room emptied of everything but the order. The only plate in the set where she takes up the whole width of it.
The Darkness
Attendants in white, a lit doorway, and the black past it she is walking into anyway.
The Watcher
Awake beside a sleeping child, the lamp nearly out. No regalia in this one but the arm-band she has not taken off.
The Roof at Dawn
Elbows on the parapet, the city grey-blue underneath, the first colour coming up. The one plate with sky in it.
“The same face, three thousand years later, in a coat that does not fit her.”
1918
Two plates
The Bunker
A tin cup, an oil lamp, a dressing station cut into the earth. The candlelight is the same candlelight as Egypt — deliberately.
No Man’s Land
Her back to us at the edge of the churned ground. The first plate in the set that refuses to show her face.
Elsewhere
One plate
Out of Time
A shore that is not Earth. Two moons, trees the size of water-towers, one figure walking and no scale to measure her against.
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