I am delighted to have been commissioned by Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in the Sussex Downs, as part of an exhibition which will will run until April 2024. Drawn to the Light (نور) is a textile-based installation which accompanies Double Weave: Bourne and Allen’s Modernist Textiles.

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Lanterns and pathways of personal symbols lead visitors into the installation, which explores my experience as a deaf African-Arab with Sudanese heritage. The installation features textiles coloured with natural dyes using techniques pioneered by textile designers Bourne and Allen. One thing I aim to express in this work is our interconnectedness to each other, our intertwined histories and environments. This personal investigation is made all the more essential for me with current events in Sudan, devastating a homeland and disrupting a diaspora to which I belong.

 

As such, Drawn to the Light (نور) takes up a moment when my homeland of Sudan is collapsing into warfare, obliterating not just the livelihoods of its people, including my family, but our place in its past and future, everything familiar disappearing all at once. I feel this links to all moments of crisis in our lives, when all we can do is take ourselves from where we stand and leave without thinking, not even knowing where the way before is leading, as long as we sense light ahead, some rays of hope.

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