Artist Statement ★

In my work, I explore the colligation of comfort and discomfort found in nostalgia, heritage, childhood, family, memory, the self, as well as the complexity of being a first generation immigrant from a nation currently undergoing the trauma of war. Formally, I engage with these themes with the use of bright colors, expressionistic and childlike mark-making, cultural motifs like the evil eye and Arabic script (often detailing personal diary-like passages as a sort of language-based code), memorializing memories and written word in soft materials like fabrics and embroidery, and quaint “cute” imagery. In so doing, I evoke a sense of comfort, nurturing, and a return to childhood innocent intuitions. At the same time, I juxtapose the visual brightness with the seriousness of the subject matter (i.e. an accelerated childhood, diaspora, tense familial relationships, cultural fables) to imply that my work sees the world's darkness through a child’s eyes, ones that we are taught to forget, and quickly grow out of, yet which see everything nonetheless. In exploring nostalgia as a fleeting and ultimately toxic concept, compounded by the history and trauma of my family and our home of Syria, I hope to convey this sweetness with a tinge of melancholy and bitterness, but ultimately with a hope that we are able to embrace goodness and light as we need. 

My work speaks on the stage of vibrant, spiritual, cultural, and melancholically soft elements. At the same time, I engage in ideas of memory, home, space, and an upbringing influenced by a wider multicultural milieu. In my recent work, I have been exploring the different types of love found in life, from familial or maternal with my soft sculpture book يا ماما (Ya Mama), to platonic (specifically feminine) love. Ideas of touch and intimacy, specifically how they relate to our wider well being, are explored with my accumulating sculptures of hands, titled The Votive Means You’re Cured. I also am interested in exploring the juxtapositions and implications of fabric and soft material in my works like The Father and The Mother, my FURSCA installation work Venus Fly Trap, and multimedia projects like يا ماما. I also seek to explore the power of the Arab tarab concert style experience, known for its hypnotic and impassioning effects in its listeners. More specifically, through this I wish to engage with the building of community and endurance of culture through diaspora. How can a people look to traditions, created long before the hurting began, to heal?