02 July 2018

Brief encounter

... with a "patchwork" "painting" by Ayan Farah (at Pippi Holdsworth Gallery). 
"Ayan Farah’s large paintings are stained, soaked and dipped with natural pigments sourced from across the world – plant dyes, clay, mud, terracotta, ash and India ink. You might imagine the works to be visceral and messily expressive from this description yet Farah’s patchworked pieces are tightly constructed and neatly stitched. " (via, writing about her Maps exhibition in 2016)

Images from the Maps exhibition:
Ayan Farah, Maps, installation view, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, 2016, l to r, Iman and Khaali

"Made up of small square and rectangular fragments of antique cotton and jute (remnants of the artist’s previous paintings), these scraps are assembled and stretched into coherent surfaces – irregular grids in a variety of greys and creams, faintly suffused with delicate shades of yellow, orange, pink and blue.

"The works appear like fields as seen from the air – a patchwork spread of tiny abstract landscape paintings that confuse scale, place and perspective. Farah’s practice is informed not only by the history of landscape and colour field painting in a formal sense and by aspects of land art in a material one but by various traditions of weaving, quilting and embroidery. ... Farah’s fabric pieces are pressed flat or heavily creased; others have degraded through time and use, thinning until the woven threads are ready to tear. There is a literal stitching together of personal histories, techniques, materials and diverse frames of reference within the work, all underscored by the history, geography and politics of gender, ownership, labour and production."

Born to Somalian parents and raised in Sweden, Farah has lived in Hackney (London) since about 2000. The works are about a reclamation of materials (she uses mud and much more) and, given her peripatetic history, of place.

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