Ayan Farah

Vik

The painting is composed of nineteenth century linen collected over five years. The pieces started out as offcuts from a large work called Fabaceae, which refers to the carob bean, an African staple found in the rainforest and tropical forests. The artist took these already dyed offcuts and dyed them further and then put them out in the sun to fade. The indigo came from a plant she grew in London and the rust came from discarded industrial metal found in Hastings and Vinterviken in Sweden. The carob, used to fix the indigo, was collected in Essaouira, Morocco. She then cut the offcuts into strips and sewed them together on a machine. The linen was purchased in Salon de Provence from two members of the family estate. The work thus brings together linen from two different parts of the family. The two monograms in red are retained from the original.

The title Vik is short for Vinterviken, meaning winter bay, the area in Stockholm where Ayan Farah made the work and where she has been living since the beginning of the year. It is the place where Alfred Nobel established a research laboratory and factory in southern Stockholm to make nitroglycerin, buying up the whole area in 1865. After 1971 it became a recreational area belonging to the city of Stockholm. The industrial materials employed by Nobel’s factories however have led to extensive soil contamination with high levels of lead and arsenic. Unusually high levels of uranium have also been detected on the bottom of the cove. By employing materials gathered from this damaged environment Farah repurposes them and ‘cleans’ them, with the blues and greys are redolent of the wintry light reflecting off the sea.