Vik

2020 - Painting (Painting)

60 x 50 cm

Ayan Farah

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The painting is composed of nineteenth century linen collected over five years. The pieces started out as offcuts from a large work called Fabaceae, which refers to the carob bean, an African staple found in the rainforest and tropical forests. The artist took these already dyed offcuts and dyed them further and then put them out in the sun to fade. The indigo came from a plant she grew in London and the rust came from discarded industrial metal found in Hastings and Vinterviken in Sweden. The carob, used to fix the indigo, was collected in Essaouira, Morocco. She then cut the offcuts into strips and sewed them together on a machine. The linen was purchased in Salon de Provence from two members of the family estate. The work thus brings together linen from two different parts of the family. The two monograms in red are retained from the original. The title Vik is short for Vinterviken, meaning winter bay, the area in Stockholm where Ayan Farah made the work and where she has been living since the beginning of the year. It is the place where Alfred Nobel established a research laboratory and factory in southern Stockholm to make nitroglycerin, buying up the whole area in 1865. After 1971 it became a recreational area belonging to the city of Stockholm. The industrial materials employed by Nobel’s factories however have led to extensive soil contamination with high levels of lead and arsenic. Unusually high levels of uranium have also been detected on the bottom of the cove. By employing materials gathered from this damaged environment Farah repurposes them and ‘cleans’ them, with the blues and greys are redolent of the wintry light reflecting off the sea.

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Ayan Farah spends considerable time travelling: to Israel, the Somali desert or to Sweden where her mother lives. As she travels, she collects materials to paint with such as mud from the Dead Sea, Mexican terracotta and discarded metals from industrial areas in Sweden from which she derives rust and clay. She also grows her own plants gathered from across the globe from which she makes dyes. She then dyes old linen that she cuts up and then sews together to form ‘paintings’, governed by organic processes, including the use of natural dyes or the influence of the weather that is brought to bear on her works by leaving them outside over long periods. The supports themselves often have their own histories too, for example linens brought from markets will come embroidered. Drawing and contours are achieved through seams. Her work invokes traditional Bogolan mud dying and Ashanti Kente textile art as well as Bauhaus and abstraction from the 1960s and 1970s. Her ‘paintings’ thus incorporate the past, refashioning and repurposing it; engaging with the politics of ‘poor’ materials – the offcuts of capitalist production, which are infused with both personal history and geopolitics.

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Colors:

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• contamination.n.03
• geography.n.01
• landscape.n.01
• texture.n.01
• archeology.n.01