Artist Statement
Among my earliest art influences and training grounds were my mother’s clothes designs; she gave me her delight for texture and the nuances of color, and my father’s story-telling feats- Both my parents gave me a passion for exploring narrative as a multilayered construction of meaning. Other influences were my native city’s omnipresent visual worlds in the handweaving arts, first centuries BCE and CE monumental representational mosaic paintings- Tunisia has the world’s largest ancient mosaic collection- and architectural vestiges of the Roman Empire. Visual and oral story-telling and ancient scripts have held my focus since childhood. There, the first waves of infinite geometric designs and limitless color palettes permeated my psyche. Fallen or still standing marble statues of all sizes, millennia old texts hand-engraved on mountain sides or steles, and very young olive trees cracking life open right through ancient columns in my native Carthage, Tunisia and across North Africa are still among my sources of inspiration- My years at the Ibn Rachiq Art Center in Tunis as a national multidisciplinary puppet theatre artist with the National Puppet Theatre Organization) still resonate in my work. After several decades of life in the American Northwest I have also become inhabited and taught by the geographic and the human landscapes of this gorgeous part of mother earth.
My mother gave me a small box of basic colors pencils when I was four years old. I have since painted to communicate and travel through “time” and “space”, and to cross real or imagined boundaries even during studies for my undergraduate and graduate art degrees. In the past I have described my painting work as semi-abstract or surrealistic. The truth is that my work doesn’t and shouldn’t fit in any already established category. I pay homage to great artists who have preceded me in the South and in the North, the East and the West, and I find inspiration wherever and whenever my brush and concepts find grounding form and pigment.
The formal qualities of the works in my exhibitions are influenced by all manifestations of nature, by poetry, Film, linguistics, and art Histories as parts of a multidisciplinary art practice that I have relied on for several decades for the development of a personal aesthetics. My paintings and Installations are usually about multiple themes, largely inspired by a sense of realism and the need for collective, life-nurturing visions and practices. I merge current or ancient myths and elements of Art Histories with a painting technique grounded in my own mostly organic use of the alphabetical multilingual letter as a plastic art medium to create paintings that can be of very limited palette or run the gamut of the color wheel. I use individual letters or single large diacritical signs (sound-making symbols) or minute brush strokes and traditional nib lines on paper or canvas to construct spaces and objective or nonobjective forms in non-linear space arrangements. Sometimes minimalist as a proverb, small narratives merge from the overall narrative of the painting. Shifting form of line tries to take the written letter back to a primal and physiological origin, as, for example, in my painting L’Aiisha; Life in our Names where four North American mothers/deities from current and ancient eras hold a joyful conversation with their 21st century living daughter and grandson, or as in my painting of the mythical Firebird/Simorgh/the Phoenix/the Sphynx” that covers a large span of the sky while it holds conversation with its human children as they hang down from under her wings, or watch various kinds of “passages” and cross some themselves, or as in my painting “Circus and Steady Dancers” where all kinds of real or imaginary creatures remind central dancers of scenes from past and present worlds of desires, passion, play and resilience. Without exception, all my artwork begins with the possibility of LOVE and ends with it.