Nour Jaouda

Nour Jaouda is a Libyan artist based in London and Cairo.

She attained her BFA at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and is currently completing her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. 

She has been awarded a solo show at Beers London Gallery for the Summer Marathon 2021 and has been shortlisted for the Chadwell Award. Recent exhibitions include Social Fabric at FOLD Gallery, What Remains at Encounter Contemporary, Final, not Over – again at Unit 1 Gallery and Thought Threads at San Mei Gallery, London.

My practice takes shape through a deconstructive process of making and unmaking, where everything is fragmentary, incomplete and in a constant state of becoming. Through painting, textile design and installation art, I explore issues of cultural mobility and the aesthetics of migration. By constructing and de-constructing cultural motifs, found images and historical references, I attempt to challenge conventional ideas of identity formation and its volatile narratives of time, place and belonging.

My work evokes issues of movement and the politics of cultural amnesia. Through the reinterpretation of traditional craftsmanship and the poetics of creative destruction, I fracture narratives to elicit meaning. Meaning, in this case, relies on the process-bound event of its deconstruction, where the act of undoing and unbuilding becomes an addition rather than negation to the work. I always start with the cut; a radical and poetic strategy that is as much destructive as it is constructive. In this act of material deconstruction, meaning is destabilized and new connections and understandings emerge, activating the social and political agency of the work. The textiles and the locally-sourced dyes embody an ecology of migration and the material identity of its history. The labour-intensive, intimate and almost obsessive engagement with the fabric animates its material agency and the social dynamism of matter. They are artifacts of a migratory practice, where movement and provisionality is immanent to the work’s production and reception.