When viewed up close Neama’s canvases are awash with an array of minutiae that keep our eyes in a constant state of engagement, even the visible stitch-work itself becomes an article of intrigue in its own right. When viewed from afar, they take on an entirely different quality, evolving into what the mind’s eye could conceivably interpret as painting with fabric, as the multitude of her astutely arranged fragments undergo a unification of sorts, converging and coalescing to create dramatic flushes of color and composition.
A couple of years devotedly in the making, we are thrilled to present for only the second time the enthralling work of Neama El Sanhoury’s fabric appliqué and collage tapestries from Tuesday 9 to Monday 29 January, 2024. Neama’s painstaking compositional style of what Safarkhan deems ‘textile painting’ involves her laborious process of sourcing and then hand stitching fragments of various types, textures and tones of fabric onto delicate linen and cotton mesh canvases. Elements of elaborate collage work are interwoven amongst such spirited textile arrangements, establishing an altogether unacquainted aesthetic, one that is steeped in the nostalgic memories of yesteryear, Egypt’s hallowed fertile ground, and the legacies of its cultural confluence over the ages. Although El Sanhoury’s art wistfully embraces and commemorates the abundance of Egypt’s past, its message of providence is crucially one for us to acknowledge and uphold for our future’s sake. Neama’s art is unlike anything else, embodying the essence of individuality, imagination and above all, ingenuity. It transports and transcends, breathing precious life into both a medium and message at risk of being forgotten.
What Neama’s work does so aptly is its ability to capture the old world charm with a contemporary impression, but one that determinedly carries with it the wisdom of age. It is through this dichotomy that El Sanhoury is able to communicate the underlying meaning of her work; namely that knowledge of our past must be cherished and upheld for the sake of our future prosperity. Neama’s work bears the time-worn and weathered sensation of a relic whose many stories are yet to be uncovered, and as always it involves the confluence of myriad cultural markers and signifiers. Mirroring the cotton meshing that she stitches her fabric and collage onto, it is an illustrative meshwork of these civilizational influences. It is a grand assortment and interplay of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and edifices, Coptic textiles and motifs, Islamic architecture and landmarks, Greco-Roman mythology and design, all concocted within her own reflective method of abstraction. Ultimately, El Sanhoury’s work is contemplated and generated in a thoroughly modern constitution that appeals to and imparts upon our present-day conscience. When viewed up close Neama’s canvases are awash with an array of moving minutiae that keep our eyes in a constant state of engagement, even the visible stitchwork itself becomes an article of intrigue in its own right. When viewed from afar, they take on an entirely different quality, evolving into what the mind’s eye conceivably interprets as painting with fabric, as the multitude of her astutely arranged fragments undergo a unification of sorts, converging and coalescing to create dramatic flushes of color and composition.
El Sanhoury’s upbringing in what she describes as a culturally enriching household is primarily what cultivated her profound appreciation and commitment to venerating Egypt’s wealth of historical and civilizational heritage. Naturally, she pursued her studies in a similar direction, specifically in applied arts as well as Egyptology in France, before embarking on her career in art. The inspirational thrust behind Neama’s captivatingly unique ‘textile painting’ stems predominantly from her dearly held childhood memories, which gave birth to her innate fixation on restoring into our collective conscience the wisdom and achievements of those ancient civilizations that we too often seem to disregard with ungrateful ignorance in the modern day. El Sanhoury’s art contends that it is by honoring, rectifying and reconnecting these–forgotten but not yet lost–threads of shared cultural inheritance, that we may seek to better ourselves and our current condition, individually and collectively, in the here and now.
