“Cities, like desires, are product of needs and fears,” Italo Calvino wrote in Invisible Cities. Streets are lined with the key lives that play out inside the house, revealed in furtive glimpses by home windows and doorways left ajar, its structure a patchwork imprint of the those who have handed by these locales. Every view across the subsequent nook unfurls a line drawn from the current into the previous, of household historical past handed by generations and the wending traces of ships which have introduced migrants abroad. Nour Jaouda was born between two locations and now finds herself with connections to 3. Born and raised in Cairo inside a Libyan household, she at present lives between London and Cairo, and retains a studio in every.

Cairo, the place that Jaouda first referred to as residence, is a metropolis that’s ever-renewing, a hybrid house constructed upon majestic historical past and colonial intervention, of a craving for the previous and a drive in direction of the long run. Her relationship to the traditional Egyptian metropolis is formed by her household’s historical past of migration and a sense of present in-between, a slippery expertise of presence and non-presence, and of what precisely it means to belong. The various layers that make up Jaouda’s work are woven from this similar palimpsest of time and house, of material stitched collectively from the threads of her personal multifaceted identification and cut up sense of self. Textiles discovered by the artist at markets in Cairo and London, a mixture of uncooked and primed canvas and pure Egyptian cotton, are stitched collectively and blended in new shapes. Some textures are free or tough, whereas others are tightly sure. Collectively their topography affords another map of her encounters with the town, localised to their avenue corners and flashes of her temporary interactions with their distributors.

“Color,” Josef Albers as soon as mirrored, “is probably the most relative medium in artwork.” Simply as there are infinite shades of inexperienced when wanting up at a tree or out at a foggy mountain within the distance, so are there infinite variations to be discovered within the interplay of color with material. Jaouda dyes her supplies in vivid pure pigments that remodel every scrap by their saturation right into a rainbow array of yellows, pinks, greens and blues that dance and infuse by them, like a drop of ink amidst an enormous pool of water. Color comes alive and is made bodily, threedimensional, pushing outwards into new types that crease and intensify with time. Neither a painter nor a sculptor, as an alternative hovering someplace between the 2, Jaouda nonetheless has a painter’s sensibility in her attunement to the impact {that a} brilliant or muted hue can have upon the shifting of a temper and even probably the most fleeting of emotions. A delicate color glimpsed on a passer-by can carry again an intense craving for a cherished one, or a reminiscence lengthy forgotten.

In Jaouda’s stressed work, the exceptional fluidity of textiles turns into totally obvious. Fabric may be folded inwards, packed and transported, rolled up and sure. It may also be stretched huge, unfurled, fanned out and draped to type a cloak or perhaps a momentary place of relaxation. A single sheet of cotton can, with a gust of wind, shift momentarily from two to 3 dimensions. For Jaouda, the tactility of her supplies is rooted on this transformative high quality, shapeshifting in a pressure between sanctuary and fragility, mass manufacturing and personalisation. Minimize and sewn, deconstructed after which reconstructed, they provide away glimpses of social historical past and private reflection that trickle away like a dialog briefly overheard from a restaurant terrace, directly unfamiliar and but profound.

The construction and design of Jaouda’s wall items are impressed by the Islamic prayer mat, with the tassels and textiles nodding to the non secular areas which can be created from the extremely particular configuration of supplies within the type of divine geometry. Reconfigured and pulled aside, Jaouda suspends these stitched scraps from bent metal, cascading down from the metalwork in a fragile array of shapes that meld the commercial qualities of the metal with the intimate home associations of woven material. Jaouda’s metal frames are themselves fashioned from fragments of the previous, taken straight from former gates and doorways dotted round downtown Cairo, the place the light grandeur of the European-inflected colonial structure can nonetheless be seen in growing disrepair. Eliminated and remade by Jaouda in patterns that echo their origins, the previous is inherently embedded within the new. Each bit hints on the streets that these curved metal gates as soon as flanked, their doorways the division between exterior and inside, concurrently forbidding and welcoming, a portal between two states of being.

Whereas strolling down the road, I’ve often encountered a foot or handprint frozen within the cement of the pavement, or perhaps a playful graffitied drawing swiftly scratched with a twig. I as soon as noticed the paw print of a cat fossilised within the gray concrete on an overcast London afternoon, a everlasting document of a momentary strut throughout the floor because the cement was nonetheless setting, like a shadow that refuses to vanish with the shifting daylight. How way back, I questioned, had that cat walked throughout this path? Underneath Jaouda’s path, cement turns into a floor for excavation, someplace between sculpture and drawing, as she carves quickly into its nonetheless liquid face earlier than it hardens. The place the stitching of textiles requires a slowness that defies the pure rhythms of instinct, sketching in cement invitations fast resolution making and mark-making that’s part-deliberate, part-unconscious in its many twists and turns. Is {that a} fig tree within the monotone of the concrete? Illustration melts away into abstraction, color into laborious stone.

There’s a fixed sensation when encountering Jaouda’s installations of a piece in progress, of the unravelling (or rebuilding) or a undertaking that’s simply halfway by and nonetheless lively. Their unfinished qualities—provisional, filled with chance, with the artist’s hand nonetheless current—are the important thing to their seductive attract. In spite of everything, what separates an artist’s studio from the gallery? The heavy frames encircling the hung canvases and the lick of white paint upon the partitions? Jaouda brings her course of, directly repetitive and ritualistic, into the gallery, the place every work is an invite to hint its historical past again not simply to its inception within the studio however even additional into the previous. Damaged aside and fragmented, Jaouda invitations us to take part in placing the items again collectively once more. We peer by the doorway and hover on the edge, earlier than taking step one inside.

—Louise Benson

at Union Pacific, London
till July 8, 2023