This piece was first pubslihed in Hadara Magazine

BY ANNA SEAMAN

For an artist best known for her investigations into formality in structure, it may have come as a surprise that the opening artwork for Shaikha Al Mazrou’s first institutional solo exhibition was a pile of blue sand.

“It may look like only blue sand, but there is a lot more behind it than that,” Al Mazrou says. Indeed, during the build-up to this exhibition, which opened in March in Sharjah’s Maraya Art Centre and closed at the end of August, the artist’s home studio was littered with the detritus of countless trial and error colour-mixing experiments that the self-described perfectionist undertook to reach an exact shade of blue, which she had seen in a dream.

“It is based on very personal experiences and conversations, but I mostly wanted to keep that hidden. I’ve always been interested in the idea of deconstruction,” she says.

CLOSE TO THE COAST BUT NOT TOO CLOSE (2020) above and WE MET HALFWAY (2020) below

One sculpture is a square at one end and at the other it is a circle, but where, the viewer can scrutinise, is the exact moment of this metamorphosis?

Deconstruction is a carefully considered choice of word. When interpreted in this context, rather than just a display of material, the sand was a display of potential. In the same way a rock is just a rock before a sculptor excavates a creation, this pile of sand represented all that could be shaped from it and thus was a metaphor for the building blocks of all material form.

Titled Close To The Coast But Not Too Close, it was also conceptually founded upon the sorites paradox, a mathematical riddle that ponders an unanswerable question: when does one grain of sand change a collection of sand granules from a non-heap into a heap?

“I feel strongly that the format of a paradox reflects not just me as an artist but me as an individual,” Al Mazrou says. “We are all, in some ways, a paradox; humanity is extremely complex and to express that in seemingly simple forms is in no way a simplification of meaning.”

Al Mazrou’s practice has always pivoted around these ideas. Her interest in minimalism began early, and from the start she has committed serious research into abstraction. For someone so young—Al Mazrou is only 31—she has a mature and studious outlook. Since her mid 20s, when she began lecturing in the College of Fine Arts and Design in the University of Sharjah, she has grounded her work in deep research and continues to delve as deeply as possible into the history of the thought-schools informing her learning.

“I rely on metaphor a lot and in these new works I feel that I am unveiling and veiling at the same time. As the artist, I have the authority to protect myself but I am also allowing spectators to enter my realm.”

Always keen to expound upon the historical context of her work, her sculptures oscillate between deep concept and a playfulness that engages and sometimes confounds the viewer. The Tension Series, created at the Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, as a graduation project for her master’s degree, showed ability to deal with stone and metal to create dynamic works and revealed an ongoing interest in duality—things are not always as they appear.

In her most recent exhibition at Maraya, titled Rearranging the Riddle, which coincided with the release of her first monograph, the same topic was addressed. For this show, Al Mazrou cited Briony Fer’s On Abstract Art, which states that abstract art cannot be simply categorised as art without subject matter. Rather, it reveals a duality between presence and absence and attempts to expand the realm of visual perception. Al Mazrou informed her work with this theory and also worked at revealing more intimate personal details, although always in symbolic terms. “I rely on metaphor a lot and in these new works I feel that I am unveiling and veiling at the same time. As the artist, I have the authority to protect myself but I am also allowing spectators to enter my realm.”

This multiplicity of meanings was summarised most clearly in two copper sculptures—We Met Halfway (2020)—which were imbued with latent mathematical formulae that changed their shapes. One sculpture was a square at one end and a circle at the other. But where is the exact moment of this metamorphosis? It remains a riddle.

SAND-LAND (2017), a 225-square-metre land project in the Ras Al Khaimah mountains, a series of perfectly executed concentric circles. **Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi and the artist.**

“There is always a dichotomy in my work or a tension between two elements,” Al Mazrou says. “However, as the title of the exhibition suggests, this is not a solved puzzle. I am rearranging it, but it is still a riddle.”

The idea for the exhibition began with the artist taking some of her own advice. “I always tell my students to look back at their practice and try to understand it all over again. When I did that, I realised that even though my practice has been about formality and materiality, it has always had a personal touch. My artworks bear my fingerprints and I can’t escape that.”

The exhibition was curated by Cristiana De Marchi, an artist and curator who has worked with Al Mazrou since being introduced to her in 2013 by pioneering Emirati artist Hassan Sharif. In her curatorial essay, De Marchi encourages audiences to simultaneously uncover the story of the artist as well as shine the light of investigation upon their own lives.

Self-reflection is probably best exhibited in the use of glass, to which Al Mazrou is no stranger. In Rearranging the Riddle, she introduced To Create Meaning in Perception (2020)—five large panels of glass, all in varying shades of blue, whose colour changes depending on the viewer’s position. Their imposing presence, which is simultaneously strong and fragile, can also be identified in previous exhibitions. Exhale (2018) from her last solo show at her representative gallery, Lawrie Shabibi in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, used a pane of filmic glass to dissect a pillow-like sculpture and Al Mazrou’s Artist’s Garden commission for the Jameel Arts Centre—Green House: Interior yet Exterior, Manmade yet Natural (2018)—was also made of massive sheets of gradient-toned glass, this time in green.

“There is always a dichotomy in my work or a tension between two elements. However, as the title of the exhibition suggests, this is not a solved puzzle. I am rearranging it, but it is still a riddle.”

UNTITLED (2019) Pieces that explored materiality, steel structures that challenge perceptions (top). EXHALE (2018) similarly juxtaposes hard and soft (bottom left). GREEN HOUSE: INTERIOR YET EXTERIOR, MANMADE YET NATURAL (2018) a commissioned sculpture for the Art Jameel garden (bottom right).

While a fascination with industrial material continues to feature heavily in Al Mazrou’s work, she insists that as she pushes the boundaries of her practice, she is working hard to reveal more of herself and suffuse the pieces with emotion.

“[My] previous works were merely a formal invitation to engage the spectator in a direct sensorial, physical engagement,” says the artist in a transcript conversation printed in the catalogue for the show. “Nonetheless, in this current body of work, there’s a new kind of invitation, an invitation to the audience through poetic objects that express emotions.”

It is true that the poetic titles seem to request a deeper commitment to understanding the personality behind them. In An Autobiography of Colour (2020), Al Mazrou created brick-shaped blocks from the tonal variations of blue found with a commercial paint supplier. “I selected each colour based on my personal, emotional reaction to the title and then created these bricks to give a body to the experience that the titles allude to. Take Journey Into the Night for example, or Blue to the Bone,” she explains. “These are not just names, they are situations, scenes, environments, and they each deserve form.” Similarly, with Sky and Ocean and Everything in Between (2020), two blocks of resin placed on the floor of the gallery almost oozed with the dormant possibility imaginable in the space left between them.

It is in this space, which De Marchi describes in her essay as “the secret of the transition,” that the heart of Al Mazrou’s practice can be approached. “An idea is always in transit,” Al Mazrou says. “In that way, neither an idea nor a work is ever complete.” Considering this, then the artist is always at work as her ideas are cogitating and so her practice never rests.

In the coming year, Al Mazrou is a finalist in the 2020 edition of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize, the exhibition will open at the Galeria Municipal do Porto in Portugal in September. She will also be one of five artists with sculptures on show at Expo 2020 (now set for October 2021). Her trajectory has been meteoric, but she attributes that to the fortune of being born into the right generation and capitalising on opportunity. Whilst prolific and often shifting in aesthetic, if there is a line to be drawn between Al Mazrou’s various works it can be found in that place of unknowing, in that in-between space between tension and slack, formality and collapse where things can unravel yet remain bound.

A Riddle Inside A Riddle

“There is always a dichotomy in my work or a tension between two elements. However, as the title of the exhibition suggests, this is not a solved puzzle. I am rearranging it, but it is still a riddle.”