An artist between
languages.

For years I worked only in black and white, because colour can lie. Texture cannot. Then Shafaq happened.

I was born between languages and now make work from a studio in the UAE, a country that holds a different version of the same desert my grandmother once described to me. The pieces begin as drawings of things I cannot photograph: the weight of a prayer bead in someone’s hand, the fall of cloth across a body that is no longer there, the rhythm of a verse half-remembered from childhood. I render them in plaster and acrylic and let the surface decide what survives.

My work sits in the space between sculpture and painting. Most of what I make is wrong twice before it is right once. I am not interested in finishing pieces. I am interested in finding out what the material wants to say when I stop arguing with it.

Shafaq is the light just before the sun, or just after it, the hour you cannot photograph either. It arrived without asking: saffron, coral, a seam of magenta and gold torn through the middle. I spent a week deciding whether to paint over it, and I didn’t. The rule, it turns out, was never about colour. It was about not decorating. That piece is not decoration. It is the same argument with the same material, held at a higher temperature.

I think about what travels with you when you move from one country to another, and what doesn’t. The pieces are not Iranian, not Emirati, not Welsh. They are mine. I hope they feel like that, like they belong to whoever stands in front of them long enough to listen.