ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice explores the colligation of comfort and discomfort found in nostalgia, language, home, memory, and the human tender nature: a ceaseless search for connection, for a tranquility in the self-made narratives of our past. Longing and community fostered in search of this humanity are especially important as a child of Arab diaspora. I am deeply inspired by a sense of “by-proxy memory.” Storytelling and the written word of family—recipes of aunties, tales of friendships and homes traversed—expand the world of my own. How does personhood stretch when provided by memories of others as well as mine? What is memorialized when every grasp of home is vital?
Formally, I engage with these ideas through laborious and repetitive processes as devotional acts, as well as delicate mark-making and soft materials that evoke the organic, and the ghostliness of memory. Material informs the coexistence of the hardy and kind, motif becomes language, and colorful and whimsical marks offer the eyes of a child: ones that we are taught to grow out of, yet which see all nonetheless.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Rana Huwais is a Chicago-based Syrian American mixed media artist specializing in printmaking, ceramics, and soft sculpture. Her work focuses on explorations of cultural and personal memory, the peace and melancholy of nostalgia, and an embrace of naive optimism in form and life. Her work has been shown nationwide and in international publications, such as ‘Altiba9 Magazine’ and ‘Needlebound’. Her current work is exploring intimacy and touch, reimagining of cultural motif, the spectrum of consumption, love, and isolation, and the deconstruction of language in the digital era. She is most inspired by the romanticization of the mundane, and any moments found in daily life that cause the heart to soften. She also was responsible for the curation of multiple exhibitions as Albion College’s Curatorial Assistant in Dickinson Gallery.
© Rana Huwais