Tender Grain
This ongoing series of sculptural photographs, paintings and furniture reference the reliefs found in Assyrian monuments, particularly those depicting flora. The images portray present-day versions of those species, many of which no longer exist within Syria’s borders due to geopolitical changes, plant migration, or extinction. Highlighting these shifts invites reflection on our relationship to land and borders, and how plant migration mirrors human migration — both shaped by the need to adapt, evolve, and form diasporic communities.
This botanical mapping of the Levant also considers the role of scent in evoking a romanticized attachment to place, and how such nostalgia can limit broader senses of connectedness. As a Syrian, I feel a strong affiliation to Syrian land and therefore other myself, even towards border nations like present day Lebanon which was, until recent history, part of present-day Syria. Does differentiated culture and our affinity to ancestral land separate ourselves?
Landscapes shift, borders change, and both ecology and geology transform. But does our relationship to land evolve with these mediated histories?
Heartstrings Collapse
Heartstrings Collapse explores the cross-over between physicality and emotionality. Glitches, which appear through a microscopy photographic process, describe the relationship one has to their own internal body: Inherent but unfamiliar. They behave as vulnerabilities in the technology’s anatomy, abstractly exposing themselves. Although internal workings aren’t typically seen, emotions physically manifest themselves through involuntary malfunctions, like a stream of sweat down the forehead from anxiety, cheeks turning red from embarrassment, or a choke when lost for words.
The series adopts such physical manifestations of emotions as image titles, such as Tremble, Sweat, Choke, Twitch, Palpitate and Blush.
Rose Tinted
Rose Tinted investigates the notion of perception and how it’s shaped through expectation.
The sculptured landscapes are shaped by generalised depictions of utopic scenes, forming trees, mountains, city scapes, a sunset. The photographic depictions, however, do not match their surrounding shape. This misalignment stems from the contradiction between the ideal and real, or the perception of something and its reality.
The series builds upon my preoccupation with borders, examining how they emerge from our expectations. In this ‘medium scale world’, the perception of division, lines, and boundaries are ingrained. Our anticipation of borders not only enhances their significance but also molds our understanding of them. Ultimatley, our expectations fundamentally influence our perception.
Building Blocks
“Building Blocks extends the artist’s preoccupation with micro images and dichotomies between proximity and distance, into an examination of memory and cognitive associations. This series maps the cellular make up of three elements meaningful to the artist: jasmine and soil from her grandmother’s Damascus garden, and Aleppo soap. Triggers of olfactory memories sourced from Sara’s native Syria, the protagonists of these works awaken thoughts of things and places she associates with the realm of the familiar, yet also perceived as foreign.
Using a Scanning Electron Microscope, Sara captures the cellular structure of each sample. The large-scale renditions include deliberate glitches such as formal distortions, light leaks or reticle crosslines—interferences that further abstract the works and hint at the imperfection of memory and longing.
The organic shapes that imitate topographies Sara randomly encounters during her scanning journey, explores the relief of all three samples morphed into one. Ensues the uneasy realization that coming closer is here synonymous with grasping less.” Coline Miliard
