Inspired by works of many female artists who used textile and stuffed fabric structures in the past as a mean to heal their past and address very intimate narratives -like Louse Bourgeois, Dorothea Tanning or Magdalena Abakanowicz- Manal AlDowayan has created a series of soft sculptures and fabric Totems (2019) that constantly need to be moved and adjusted; destroyed and reconstructed. They are delicate and susceptible to collapse at any moment, but their resilience is in their softness and agility. All of the artwork surfaces are printed with statements and images from religious books and address stories that have been fragmented, broken into multiple shapes. Re-arranging them the images become invisible and purely aesthetical forms, allowing the artist to take power and control over the message. In their reconstruction AlDowayan attempts to create a new narrative that reconciles what is, what has been, what can be, and what will be.
