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Painting (MA)

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.

Degree Details

School of Arts & Humanities

Painting (MA)
Nour Jaouda

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 By constructing and de-constructing cultural motifs, found images and historical references, I attempt to challenge conventional ideas of identity formation and its volatile narratives of time, place and belonging.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. 


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Medium:

Fabric dye, pigment and acrylic on canvas, Steel

Size:

Dimensions Variable
In Most Nights, We Weep in Advance
In Most Nights, We Weep in Advance — Concrete, 37x28cm
In Most Nights, We Weep in Advance (detail)
In Most Nights, We Weep in Advance (detail)
We were limbs in the Wind
We were limbs in the Wind — Concrete, 30x28.5cm
We were limbs in the Wind (detail)
We were limbs in the Wind (detail)

These concrete pieces were made in response to a poem by Mohammed El Kurd and in mourning of the destruction and the Palestinian lives lost in the on-going Nakba. They are counter-monuments, memorialising the past by activating the present. A form of remembering that interrupts the passive silence of memorial.

Medium:

Concrete
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[untitled]

Medium:

Fabric dye, pigment and hand-embroidery on canvas, Steel

Size:

270cm x 100cm
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[untitled]
[untitled]

Medium:

Fabric dye, pigment and hand-embroidery on canvas, Steel
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[untitled]

Medium:

Hand-dyed cotton, Copper

Size:

165x50cm
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[untitled]
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[untitled]

Medium:

Fabric dye, pigment and hand-embroidery on printed canvas, Steel

Size:

Dimensions Variable
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[untitled]

Medium:

Mixed Media. Fabric dye, pigment and acrylic on canvas

Size:

Dimensions Variable
Scaffold
Scaffold — Ceramic on steel, 20x15cm
Untitled
Untitled — Ceramic on steel, 35x30cm

Medium:

Ceramic on steel