Process: Alyazia Al Nahyan

In Alyazia Al Nahyan’s world, nature is her teacher. Plants, inedible fruit and other found matter shape the imprints and pigments on her muslin or unprimed canvas. She dyes her fabric by wrapping autumn leaves up with it. The neem tree, also known as Azadirachta indica, has medicinal properties, Al Nahyan grew up attuned to her environment as a source of nourishment thanks to her grandparents who were interested in homeopathy and alternative medicine. But while her grandmother painted, she is the first person in her family to do it professionally.

I make my own pigment with neem leaves which I find around me a lot... I’ve been painting since I was 8. I was also very outdoorsy, collecting shells and making fairy-like potions of the things I would collect.

The leaves gathered from last season’s produce in her family farm make stains within the folds of fabric, guiding her path through the work. Her process recalls the austere beauty of textiles that are sourced from wild plants in the Japanese mingei tradition and the practice of furoshiki, or wrapping cloth, except in this case, the plants constitute the content, rather than the form of the fabric. According to Yang Muneyoshi, the founder of the mingei movement, the essence of this craft is the evocation of a beauty that is unintentional. This intuitive lack of intent very much underpins Al Nahyan’s work. While she excavates how landscapes hold bodies of memory, her results are abstract and not easily identifiable as belonging to a particular place.

As I work with material that’s already there, I try to re-imagine the landscapes they come from.

Her interest in the residual as a form of mark-making is not only a reflection of the UAE’s arid landscape where plants do not hold much pigment. Her process, which includes experimenting with compositions of rust, has a science to it.

When I first got into fabric dyeing, I realized if leaves are still fresh, they don’t mark the fabric. They only leave a trace when they are dead. I play around with found, rusted matter doused in vinegar and hydrogen peroxide. This mixture creates an iron water, which I often use in my work in different iron-to-water ratios. [The water then clings to the nitrous oxide of decomposing leaves.] I find it interesting how the water sticks to these parts.

The interplay of materials (raw fabric, decaying leaves, and rust) are what constitute the core of Al Nahyan’s practice. It is process-driven work in which she has limited forms of control. The final outcome echoes this degree of restraint, in the tension between visibility and invisibility. The stains and variations in hue manifest slowly and stubbornly in her paintings, as if trapped underneath a top layer. There is the feeling of sedimentation, of archaeology and ruin trapped beneath a substrate. There is a sense of quietness.

In the repetitive nature of her work — and the re-use of the same material over and over again — there is an undoing, a stripping back in the abstraction of form. Leaves become blurry embers, a swarm of insects, or semi-inhabited land seen from above. The skeleton of a leaf resembles a forest bifurcated by rivers. Nature bleeds into muddy greens and rusty reds. Departing from her usual monochrome backdrops, she has been experiments with dual colors across a series of untitled works, where the viewer can discern a wavy line that declines in level. In another painting, one could imagine the sea set in a foamy burgundy, which retreats from the coastline to reveal shells and fossils and waste, against thick olive green.

As feminist philosopher Luce Irigay put it in her seminal book on the expression of individuality, 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.'

 Al Nahyan doesn’t strive to speak for the seasons, for nature’s colours, shifting tides or manmade land. Rather than voicing the environment, she creates her own on fabrics, like soft sculptures that decay and are prone to silently, slowly change.