My mother converted to Islam the year I was conceived, and I was born into this process of transformation. Coming out of the hippy movement, my parents were seekers — on a quest for self-knowledge, freedom, and the divine. I grew up within closed communties organised around a spiritual master.
This inheritance informs my practice — from within it, I question how language, belief and power shape direct experience.
Through poetry, photography, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and film, I work within the threshold, moving through traces of time and the spaces in between. I work across scales of intimacy, from the personal and familial to the historical and cosmological. Transmission runs as a central theme in both material and concept. Intestinal tubes, audio resonators, organ pipes, membranes, veils, and sonic data are conductors of revelation — surfaces through which something passes and is changed.
Live media extends this into the body of the viewer: pneumatic systems, wind, vibration through sound and light act directly on breath and nervous system, inducing shifts in perception and altered states of awareness. Breath and body-based practices run through the performance and film work as both method and subject. The materials are non-hierarchical: they have travelled, been repurposed, gathered and laboured over. Ordinary and sacred.
From a young age I was immersed in the sung recitation of the Qasida. This classical Arabic poetic form I absorbed through sound before I understood it as structure, in broken phonetics before I had the language to name its workings. Looking back across the work, I find it everywhere: the threshold, the crossing, the arrival that carries the full weight of departure. Despite working across mediums, the poetic form is the logic that I return to, allowing for paradox, fragmentation, movement and hierophany.
The work moves within overlapping traditions holding contradictions and porosity rather than resolving them. Through researching colonial and orientalist legacies within my own history, I engage the figure of the storyteller — centring the women of my lineage alongside minor and marginal historical figures. My mother and other members of my family appear directly in the work: as historical source and physical presence. This practice of self-inquiry navigates my own historical complications— transforming intimate and collective relations through the gesture of opening, improvising and gathering.