Alyazia Al Nahyan UAE, b. 2000

Born in 2000, Alyazia Al Nahyan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Dubai.

Al Nahyan’s practice draws from the foraging of found materials, plants, and herbs in her environment which undergo a layered procedure in the extraction of pigment and residual forms. Marked by an attunement to her changing surroundings and the transformative power of materials, her work explores different levels of abstraction to evoke nature scenes and landscapes without directly referencing them.

Her expanded paintings, reliefs and videos are process-driven, subject to experimentation and collaboration with non-human agents. She uses turmeric, rust, hibiscus, henna, neem leaves and diluted bleach to enable different tonalities and pigments to develop and change. Playing with the natural/artificial dichotomy her works are marked by the traces of materials in her environment and the chemical results of their decomposition. In this way, her materials index environmental change, coded by color. There is also a play in perspective in which the impressions made by materials at ground level are presented like top-down or drone-like landscape views. Al Nahyan’s methodology is both intuitive and exacting in rendering the materiality of a place, its memory retained as abstract residues and traces on raw fabric.