Land(space)
scapes

Acrylic on paper

This series was produced during a residency in the rural west of Ireland alongside the Irish-American printmaker Diane Roemer. The process involved building up ochre and black layers of acrylic whilst embedding paper fragments, interrupting the site to leave spatial impressions. The approach was slow and procedural, not unlike the sedimentation of landscapes. The surface of the canvas becomes the terrain, with architectural voids acting as a counterpoint to the landscape, rather than filling it. The paintings are structured by a logic of tension between field and boundary.
The ochres and siennas refer to my native Saharan homeland, in stark contrast to the Irish rural landscape in which the works were created. They recall the tones of sand, dust, and sun-scorched walls.
Like Anselm Kiefer’s scorched terrains and Zarina Hashmi’s cartographies of loss, these works also inadvertently treat surface as archive, a place where material and memory, as well as absence are held in tension. Architecture appears only obliquely in a sense. It is not an object per se, but a void or cut in the landscape. The protagonist is the land itself.
The series became foundational. It suggested that architectural space is shaped less by formal conceit and more by the physical and archival sediments that surround it. What began as a single work developed into a series, in which architecture receded into the background, and landscape — both literal and historical — emerged as the heroine.