Ayan Farah »How to Watch the Sky«

Time seeps through the ninety-to-two-hundred-year-old linens she selects, their own wear and tear dictating the dying, layering and sowing process; never two equal results to the same method. Time is reconstituted when previous works are taken apart and incorporated into new ones, her curiosity for the next possible outcome outweighing the solidity of a long-finished piece. Time as potential exists in the seeds that Farah saves from her travels to grow future indigo or marigold. She is interested in regeneration, latent ideas, keeping the materials pulsating, making sure their existence can endure. A work might take ten years to come into being.

Farah’s work is informed conceptually and materially from various interests and locations. The ecological aspects that define a city’s outline, how a resource (or its scarcity) affects trade, or a population’s preparedness to face an uncertain future. Earlier this year she visited the National Centre for Meteorology in Abu Dhabi to continue her research on cloud-seeding; and in 2023, while in residency at the Roberts Institute of Art in Scotland, she studied how the local history of fishing and jute manufacturing shaped the local environment. Cloud-seeded water, grey clay, chalk, and seashells are just a few of the materials from her travels that were incorporated into these group of works.

Growing up in Sweden nurtured an appetite for light. In earlier paintings, she experimented with sun bleaching and photographic emulsions; and as the work broadened, this search translated in striving for a balance between light and dark, muteness and eloquence in her compositions. The incidence of the sun on her family home in Mogadishu, captured on a large marigold-dyed cloth years ago, is slowly spent on small cutouts for new works.

Handsewn embroideries of weeds and flowers make their first appearance in this set of works. In line with her fundamental resourcefulness and adaptability, no previously learned craft is exempt from being unlearnt at the studio; a place where she gives herself permission to experiment while keeping her work a vessel for histories and passed down knowledge.