Ayan Farah Mehdya, 2024. Photo by Carl Henrik Tillberg

Artist Talk | Ayan Farah with Joanna Sandell

Galerie Nordenhake opens Ayan Farah's third solo exhibition, whose works are an alchemy of substances applied on canvas, linen, hemp, and silk. She uses materials such as forest ash, clay, cloud-seeded water, indigo, mud, rust, and marigold to create dyes that are sometimes subdued in sunlight and fixed in vinegar. 

The construction of her fabrics is dictated by available material and often includes off-cuts from earlier works, accumulatively stitched together into patchworks that contain the stories of their making. Farah’s practice is self-sufficient in that her works are generated from pre-sourced materials, home-grown pigments and fundamental environmental factors such as sunlight rather than automated processes or global supply chains.