Ayan Farah at the Pippy Houldsworth gallery

Ayan Farah is an Emirati-born contemporary painter, known for her unique

mixed media paintings through which she examines the overlap between
natural and manmade environments, and notions of chance and control.
She also works in mediums of installation, photography, video and sound
art.
Farahs large paintings are tainted, sodden and dipped with natural
pigments sourced from across the world, she uses plant dyes, clay, mud,
terracotta, ash and Indian ink. the works to be instinctual, primitive and
messily expressive from this description yet her patch worked pieces are
tightly constructed and carefully stitched. The images are made up of little
square and rectangular fragments of traditional cotton and scraps of old
work; these scraps are assembled and stretched into the surfaces of
irregular grids in an assortment of greys and creams, weakly saturated
with shades of yellow, orange, pink and blue.
The works look like a view from a plane, where you see the fields patch
worked into each other, that view confuses scale, place and perspective.
Her practice is formed 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. Farahs 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 very accurate 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.
The exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth gallery is titled Maps definitely holds
significance. She says The works represent all these different elements of
places and time and borders and conflicts a lot of the places from which
Ive sourced material are around the Middle East and Africa [and have]
since become impossible almost to travel to. Through an assemblage of
materials Farah makes a challenge to chart and perhaps to optimistically
or naively re-assemble the broken places that fill our news feeds. This is a
reconfigured global map, a newly stitched skin of the world that rejects
territorial conflict and the control of natural resources.
The colours, textures, scents, sounds and stories of their sourcing, are all
embedded in the paintings in traces or more explicit marks. While these
aspects are variously evident within the work, they persist to exist
nonetheless.