RA - Hammar, 2016, indigo, linen, 200 x 120 cm

Ayan Farah RA - Hammar

Focus, September 08, 2022 September 29, 2022

Ayan Farah’s works are an alchemy of substances applied on canvas, linen, hemp, and silk. She uses materials such as forest ash, clay, cloud-seeded water, indigo, mud, rust, and marigold to create dyes that are sometimes subdued in sunlight and fixed in vinegar.

The construction of her fabrics is dictated by available material and often includes off-cuts from earlier works, accumulatively stitched together into patchworks that contain the stories of their making. Farah’s practice is self-sufficient in that her works are generated from pre-sourced materials, home-grown pigments and fundamental environmental factors such as sunlight rather than automated processes or global supply chains.

The work RA - Hammar (2016) has previously been exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and is made through a process of exposing the folded, dyed textile to sunlight for two periods, thereby creating an almost-photographic image of the creases that were present when it was exposed.

Ayan Farah was born in 1978 in Sharjah, UAE, to Somali parents. She grew up in Sweden but moved to the UK to study painting at the Royal College of Art in London. She returned to Stockholm in 2020. International exhibition venues include the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Tarble Arts Centre in Charleston, the Klein Collection in Germany, and Galeria Casas Riegner in Bogotá. Her work is included in the collections of The Kadist Foundation, the Roberts Family Foundation, Public Art Agency Sweden, and Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, among others. Ayan Farah will participate in the Black Rock Senegal 2022 Artist-in-Residence program, found-ed by renowned artist Kehinde Wiley.