Ayan Farah spends considerable time travelling: to Israel, the Somali desert or to Sweden where her mother lives. As she travels, she collects materials to paint with such as mud from the Dead Sea, Mexican terracotta and discarded metals from industrial areas in Sweden from which she derives rust and clay. She also grows her own plants gathered from across the globe from which she makes dyes. She then dyes old linen that she cuts up and then sews together to form ‘paintings’, governed by organic processes, including the use of natural dyes or the influence of the weather that is brought to bear on her works by leaving them outside over long periods. The supports themselves often have their own histories too, for example linens brought from markets will come embroidered. Drawing and contours are achieved through seams. Her work invokes traditional Bogolan mud dying and Ashanti Kente textile art as well as Bauhaus and abstraction from the 1960s and 1970s. Her ‘paintings’ thus incorporate the past, refashioning and repurposing it; engaging with the politics of ‘poor’ materials - the offcuts of capitalist production, which are infused with both personal history and geopolitics.