| Fakhriya
Al-Yahyai
Fakhriya Al-Yahyai
was born in Oman in 1973. She became an artist in 1991, and is
currently a resident lecturer in the Art Education Department
at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. |
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‘Normally
people walk around with little regard to the aesthetic.
The fabric market in Oman
is one of the biggest palaces
with huge scale,
radiance and richness,
with a variety of fabric’s colour, which people visit only
to buy fabric for wearing...
Fabric would sway my thinking...
I started to think how I could introduce these fabrics into my
work, to create from our cloth,
art, to exhibit it,
instead of only wearing it,
painting with fabric,
using a wide variety of
fabrics in my palette.’
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| Fakhriya’s
work has evolved out of an ongoing love of fabric, it’s
feel, colour and patterning. The symmetry, geometry and repetition
within Islamic Art provide a visual language with which Fakhriya
continues to explore her ideas. Her work is located within the
Universal theme of the Abstract with works on fabric which enable
her to combine the textures of paint and fabric, and to make connections
between patterns and colours in space.
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'Rhythmical'
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‘As
a child, I remember going to the market with my mother to buy
fabric for a special event, a wedding party or something and
I spent a lot of time looking. My mother said she wouldn’t
take me again, I just loved looking. And whenever I went back,
the women in the market would remember me and say, ‘we
know you, we know you are only coming to look, not to buy!’
I loved the fabric. I would spend time holding it, placing it
next to other fabrics and the women would ask what I was looking
for. I remember studying at school and I would find myself looking
at my clothes and with my pen, I would find that I was drawing
on my clothes, completing the patterns. I have loved fabric
for a long time.
When I came to think about ideas for ‘still’, I
remembered the fabric market, and began to think about the geometric
shapes that decorate the fabric, geometry being such a traditional
element in Islamic art. We live within geometry, but we cannot
live in geometry alone. Human life is organic, organic shapes
are everywhere. When you move around the points of the Islamic
star, you do not move in and out of the eight points, but your
eye moves around the points in a circle. The movement is organic.’
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| More
recent work has begun to create a more organic patterning and
to juxtapose relationships between the geometric and the organic,
reflecting ideas to do with the experience of being alive. ‘Roses’,
held on an underlying series of white lines on black could be
read as decorative, or as musical notes, or could symbolise human
experience. The symmetry and order of the blood and bones, combined
with the flow of the blood, creating a metaphor for the complexity
of human experience.
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'Roses' |
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