Alyazia Al Nahyan: In The Breath Of Decay: Curated by Nadine Khalil

“Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay,” was poet George Meredith’s 1862 ode to the feeling of autumn. In Alyazia Al Nahyan’s first solo exhibition, she traces and maps a season that is more felt than seen in the arid climate of the UAE. Autumn here becomes a gesture or movement — a tone.

Al Nahyan’s practice is based on foraging. Her primary agents are fallen leaves from the medicinal neem tree (also known as Azadirachta Indica), among others such as inedible watermelon-like fruit (colocynth), butterfly tea powder, purple cabbage and metallic residues from camping sites. These materials she collects on her walks through her family farm and elsewhere, are accentuated in the shapes they leave behind after being subjected to bleach and vinegar.

While fossilizing what is present in our vegetal world, her process is a constant act of stripping away, As she works with decomposing plants to see what emerges from them, they become her guides. Re-used leaves create the pigments on raw fabrics — the wrinkles in the unprimed canvas or muslin are what determine the final form. Swathes of forest or land can be discerned in paintings such as Sunward — thick olive-greens at times giving away to a yellow-gold or muddy red. Across the different bodies of work, Tangled Roots and Crossing Land, a single scene bifurcates into two both in tone and texture like a cross-section of time, the latter emerging from the deserts of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Al Ain.

Her abstraction of landscape continues with Ghost Town, an expanded series among which are 13 murky, movement-driven paintings. Like clouds that gather, or waves about to break, these works use found materials from the largely derelict town Jazirat Al Hamra, an ancient pearling village in Ras Al Khaimah. In Lethal Greens, a toxic plant endemic to the UAE (شجرة الأشخر) is featured in two guises — one a water-stained stem — perhaps a reference to a season’s change. Elsewhere she zeroes in on skeletal leaves which create a layer of sediment, with veins stretching out like rivers.

There is a quietness to Al Nahyan’s work, a protracted restraint and slow transformation. As feminist philosopher Luce Irigay put it in To Be Two (1997): “Your silence exists as does my self-gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world’s dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.”