ARTIST STATEMENT
My artwork and creative process plays with various mediums and art-making, including linoleum printmaking, embroidery, painting and drawing, and collaging, to capture and facilitate emotional expression, personal and communal identity, and creative healing. Whether through the creation of response art or more conceptual art pieces, I approach art mediums with curiosity in how they can facilitate a deeper emotional release and expression beyond the specific content of the overall art piece. With this approach, much of my body of work is mixed media and allows for different textures and medium manipulations to carry rich themes across the piece. It is my main priority as an artist to create art that is resonant with a variety of communities, that fosters and facilitates healing, and can be a tool for imagining and creating new liberatory worlds.
The piece, Sit With Me, is an homage to my late grandmother’s balcony in Beirut, Lebanon and the plastic chairs that held us in the most mundane of ways. The hand-embroidered chair is a comfort in knowing there is always a seat for us and all of those that joined us. The piece is adorned with cloth hands, pressed roses and eucalyptus, and flowers embroidered in the traditional Arab tatreez tradition to move us through our nostalgia, grief, and longing for ancestral homes.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yasmeen Khayr (she/her) is a Lebanese, Muslim artist based in Chicago, IL. She loves the use of art as a release of creative energy and emotion and the particular ways in which art can facilitate emotional processing and expression. She is inspired by the power of communal art making and returning herself and others to their innate creative selves. Yasmeen plays with linoleum block printing, embroidery, painting, and the interplay between different mediums.
Her pieces often capture abstract representations of feeling and emotionality; honoring of cultural traditions and objects; themes of injustice, grief, and our inner worlds; and nature motifs. Yasmeen loves to explore how different mediums can carry distinct emotions as well as how the physical maneuvering of different mediums can facilitate the emotions of the artist in the act of creation. She is constantly attempting new ways to make marks, shape materials, interweave mediums, and envision new creations. Yasmeen also facilitates art workshops often focused on artistic skill-building, nurturing community healing, and building critical consciousness around social change and collective liberation.
© Yasmeen Khayr