By Taqwa alNaqbi spent her childhood walking barefoot on the sandy beaches of Khor Fakkan admiring the rugged mountain views across the blue waters. Today these scenic memories are at the core of her art practice.
One of Taqwa’s widely applauded early artistic creations, is the Khor Fakkan book. The thick bounded book made by the artist using handmade paper represented her emotions about her surroundings. To capture elements of the city she grew up in, Taqwa left the book on the edge of the sea on Khor Fakkan beach for a few hours. Soaking in the waters of the sea, the book ended up with ridged edges. “Through my art I embrace the softness of my surroundings and document it with the process of creating the artwork. Khor Fakkan for me is synonymous with my family, comfort and mental peace. I used the book as a visual metaphor to depict thoughts about my environment and my family history,” says Taqwa, 26, who has exhibited her work at several local and international exhibitions.
An alumnus of the University of Sharjah, with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 2016, Taqwa’s work is primarily centred around papermaking and bookbinding. “Paper is a creative tool in my hands, and I find calmness in making art from it,” she shares.
The artist uses paper pulp to form sheets and objects. Enthused with her personal experiences, she introduces elements from the local culture and the region into her art. Her unique graduation project – My Grandmother’s Dresses – reflected aspects about her heritage, she is passionate about. Using parts of her grandmother’s traditional dresses, she recycled bits of them into sheets of paper and then asked her grandmother to draw on them. “Around the time I discovered papermaking in college in 2015, I started asking my grandma to draw on my handmade papers. This made me realise that my papers were made from cotton and fibre, so were her traditional dresses. I recycled her dresses to be sheets of paper, celebrating my grandmother’s culture and letting her draw on them. As she does not know how to read or write, her visual language depicted the history of the place I grew up in, what it is to be an Emirati in Khor Fakkan,” she says.
Inspired by the works of well-known local artists — Abdalla Alssadi and Mohamed Ibrahim – Taqwa’s work captures the cultural context of the UAE. Her dream project is to open a papermaking studio in the UAE that focuses on the organic elements of the region. She is currently working on a nature trace project that showcases the connection between human beings, objects and their surroundings.