The Colourful Sacred Spaces of Nour Jaouda

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 252, ‘Remapping’

The best way to approach Nour Jaouda’s richly textured, multi-coloured textiles is through process – maybe because, in their dual state of assembly and deconstruction, they evoke the feeling of works in progress. Jaouda, who is of Libyan descent, begins by sketching outlines of the geometric and organic forms she encounters in Cairo, where she grew up and currently lives, and London, where she also keeps a studio. She then transforms these flat shapes into objects that she cuts, moulds, heat-presses, tears, reconstructs and sews into layered topographies. Latticework dotting Cairene mosques, plants, flowers and Victorian architectural motifs all combine to form abstracted maps of the various places the artist inhabits or remembers.

When speaking with me this March, Jaouda uses many words that begin with ‘de’ (deconstructive, destruction, décollage) to describe her approach, though the opposite terms – additive, rebuilding, collage – are equally applicable. In Where the fig tree cannot be fenced (2023), memories of her grandmother’s fruit trees in Benghazi are distilled into an alchemical landscape of flat, interlocking patched greens. The leaf-like forms that inspired the piece are nearly indistinguishable in the final work, eroded by cuts, tears and packed compositional choices that feel more concerned with condensing decades of memory and personal cosmology than with any allegiance either to realism or formalism. Periodically, the work’s earthen hues are interrupted by negative space, suggesting mental lacunas to be filled in, made anew.

For Jaouda, material deconstruction and layering are intimately tied to the traversal of countries, languages and cultures. Rather than faithful depictions of landscape, her images reflect the often-messy process of making sense of one’s experiences of place. ‘When you have such a migratory practice, you realize how your cultural identity is formed through a constant process of becoming,’ she tells me. ‘It’s about being comfortable in the space of the in-between.’

Bouncing between cities allows colour, texture and composition to manifest in different ways. Colour most vividly functions as a language for emotion: the textiles made in Cairo feature warm yellows, blues and pinks configured loosely, whereas in London, she says, ‘the colours become cooler and softer’ – muted greens, browns and purples in tighter, grid-like arrangements. Jaouda talks about colour’s ability to transcend language: ‘I work with colour in a sculptural, physical way, which, in the process, becomes deeply spiritual and ritualistic.’ In a laborious, repetitive and very slow practice, she dyes her materials – a mix of locally sourced canvas and pure Egyptian cotton – in natural and synthetic pigments that take at least 24 hours to seep into the fabric and another 24 hours to dry. This process inherently alters the physicality of the textile; colours are brought to life, taking on depth in new forms and hues that crease and intensify with time.

Jaouda is adamant that the works’ temporality distinguishes them from the immediacy of painting. Nor does she see them as sculptures, despite their three-dimensionality. Their indeterminacy, she tells me, draws from the Islamic prayer mat – a sacred space made out of material that can be rolled up, packed and transported or laid out to create a momentary place of prayer or rest. Jaouda’s textiles often hang from the ceiling, like banners or charms, or drape over sculptural steel frames made from doors and arches sourced from downtown Cairo. In Before the Last Sky (2025), an installation for this year’s Islamic Arts Biennale, the city’s patchwork of organic beaux-arts forms and geometric modernist buildings acts as a holding structurefor more than 30 meters of fabric cascading onto the floor. Deep oranges and blues collaged into Islamic divine geometry provide a portal into a realm imbued with spirituality and ritual that you experience corporeally, rather than simply visually, when a physical sensation of stillness takes hold.

‘Geographic spots become spiritual concepts,’ Etel Adnan wrote in Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986). In restless works that shapeshift from tent to mat to map, deconstructed and sewn back together, geographic locations also become moving coordinates. Dust that never settles (2024), a wall piece suspended from a rod of steel at Frieze London, comprises a palimpsest of oceanic blues and washes of green flowing into and through each other. Here and everywhere, home is not somewhere defined by borders, but a meeting place in which a multitude of experiences coalesce. Unfixed and full of possibility, like a map of dust that never settles.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 252 with the headline ‘Alchemies of Place’

‘Nour Jaouda’ will be on view at Spike Island, Bristol, from 27 September

^{Main image: Nour Jaouda, Dust that never settles (detail), 2024, hand-dyed cotton canvas, steel, 1.3 × 2.4 m. Courtesy: the artist}