Jamila Lamrani

Morocco
Visual
Artist in Residence, 2016
jamilamrani.blogspot.com

Artist Statement

I try with my own means to express the world around me as I see and feel it, my starting point is always my surrounding, my memory, but with my very personal perception of things. I try to trace my relationship to society and the world in its most sensitive way. I always mention that “I am the architect” of my work. There is often a void that I surround with a structure, and I sculpt it. The materials I use in my work are fabrics, lace, calligraphy, cotton, tree, branches, sound, light, or shadows. My work focuses on and materializes an intimately veiled world of women, which I represent using dresses. When I talk about human beings more generally, I use chairs, tree branches, and shifts in scale to identify, develop, and show this world full of tension and softness. I also try to touch the unspoken, and to trace a territory of the “unspoken” with my works, which suggest and question the confinement and the need to protect. The repetitive dimension in my work refers to the time and duration of the realization of a work. This repetitive gesture relates to the status of women and their way of daily work (embroidery, sewing, assembling, bury, interlacing, carving, weaving) and the acts that trace a perspective of life of women in Arab society. Usually the themes in my universe are linked to dreams, imprisonment, confinement, borders and difficulties to overcome borders in a society that owns us and weighs heavily in our relationships. I try to draw a fictional territory, giving a memory, to a distant or imaginary dream.

While At Headlands

During the residency at Headlands I will continue the process of making work while exploring the potentiality of this new space. I also expect that meeting Headlands’ community will effect my work. My interventions on site rely on pure experimentation—in order to produce works (in situ) that dwell in space, I will create very subtle territories which will emerge and take shape gradually to build a new fictional geography in the existing geography. The inspiration in this new cultural space, and by visiting museums and galleries and discovering new artistic practices and the possibility of carrying out new works in the studio, will allow me to make a series of interventions that explore different ideas. I would like to develop projects related to the concept of space and borders: the walls and the site of Headlands have a memory—they transmit energy. I will immerse myself in the atmosphere here to make a set of experimental interventions, that develop the ideas that haunt me.