Nadia Al-Sayed

Each thread carries a journey. My grandmother taught me to weave using techniques she brought with her when she left Damascus decades ago, and that inheritance sits at the centre of everything I make. I often work fragments of old family textiles, a scarf, a tablecloth, a child's garment, directly into new woven pieces, so that objects carrying one history become structurally part of another. The process is slow by necessity: hand weaving cannot be rushed, and I have come to think of that slowness as part of the work's meaning, a refusal of the speed that displacement usually demands of people. Embroidery lets me add text and symbol on top of the weave, sometimes in Arabic script that only some viewers can read. I want the pieces to hold specific, personal history while still speaking to anyone who has ever had to rebuild a sense of home somewhere new.