Sky Clouds 2009
Sky Clouds is a work that plays with meaning and the relationship between words and objects. It invites readers to be more critical in their viewing of art.
The title may positively suggest plump cotton-like balloons floating in a bright blue sky. Yet, these objects are not from that picturesque fairy-tale representation. Instead, they invite a more uncanny reading. Hands, emerging from seeming nothingness, point towards the sky in unison, suggesting communal activity and solidarity.
The black polyester gloves are filled with sand from the Saudi Arabian desert. Both materials are free-flowing; polyester is a cheap but fairly modern invention, manufactured from petrochemicals. Indicating the beginning of a new age and world order in human civilization. The increasing speed of communication, and travel, as well as the increasing preference for the manufactured over the natural and organic, is indicative of this. There has been a turn in power relations as the Gulf region becomes open to the West through petro-commerce. Lined with traditional Islamic prayer rugs, the gloves suggest an oxymoronic combination of the aesthetic and the metaphysical, the synthetic and the natural. An unprocessed substance, the desert sand is the complete antithesis of the Polyester fabric.
These gloves are traditionally used to cover female hands. Although the substance and essence of pointing towards heaven is a spiritual and organic one, the gloves that clothe these hands are artificial and man-made. The works speak to the trend towards conservative female dress in the Islamic region, which uses Islamic discourse to create an artificial spirituality choking the ethereal essence.
