Emergent Dreams
Emergent Dreams:
Limited Edition Archival Prints available - scroll to the bottom of the page.
A series of hybrid digital/analogue collage works that draw on 19th colonial postcards from Egypt showing women holding water vessels. Created using high resolution photographs of postcards from my collection, together with other analogue materials that I create using watercolour, Indian ink, graphite, gold dust and a variety of collage materials. These works express my desire to give the women back their dreams, hopes and powers, to create new emergent possibilities for how we view them. I wanted to reveal the multiple layers of histories and identities, North African, West African, Ottoman, Medieval, Mamluke, and others, including other-worldly presences, all lying beneath the surface of the colonial images of the postcard women of Egypt.
Night Moth Casts a Spell: Using archival images of a 19th century Sudanese spell/talismanic ink drawing and an an image of an old 19th century colonial lithograph of Cairo. The written amulet contains a spell to protect against the evil eye, so I have inscribed it over her, to suggest that she is casting it over herself and over Cairo. Lithographs of monuments of this era often created a fantasy about those monuments and the people.
White Apparition: A premonition of things that were to come, drawing on the Zar ritual that perceives the presences of disruptive outsiders within, multiple layers of others that can either haunt or inspire us, and drawing on the Dinshiway incident where the peaceful pigeon or dove became a cultural meme of colonial oppression.
Breaking The Universe: Working with ideas about the black niello folk designs on Middle Eastern jewellery worn by women as a pattern for a different universe that will break the previous structures and designs imposed over Egypt and women of Egypt. Ornamentation allows us to transcend the physical world.
Resplendent/Shining One: Drawing on the metamorphosis of escape, and on ancient ideas of the incarnated body, the butterfly as soul, Psyche, and as an embodiment of the fleeting and ephemeral, and the drawing on the collecting history and meanings of iridescence of the blue Morpho. I have also used a colonial lithograph of Al Hakim mosque, as a deep layer, to excavate Fatimid histories of Egypt and release and re-situate the name Fatima from its use on colonial postcards.
Night Moth Casts A Spell
White Apparition
Breaking The Universe
Resplendent/Shining One
Limited Edition Archival Prints For Sale
Price per print: £250
Edition: 12
Size: 46cm x 33.7cm (h x w)
Paper:
Archival Hahnemühle Hemp 290gsm * Please message me to enquire about other print sizes
Postage costs:
Royal Mail 24 Hour Tracked - £5 - approx 2 working days
Royal Mail EU Recorded Delivery - £9 - approx 7 working days
Royal Mail International Recorded Delivery - £12 - approx 10 working days
* (all signed for, delivery times may now vary due to Covid and Christmas)
How to order:
Please send me a message via the contact page if you’d like to buy one of these prints by PayPal or bank transfer.
Once you have ordered a print I will individually post out to you a signed Certificate of Authenticity with the number of your print.
*Hahnemühle Hemp 290gsm is made of 60% hemp fibre and thanks to the bright white colour of the hemp fibres, no optical brighteners are required. The lightly textured surface gives the paper a pleasant, silky feel. Colours and details are brilliantly reproduced, the depth of the black truly stands out and contrasts are reproduced with stunning effect.
