Alya Alkaabi
فوق موج البحر
Painting and Printmaking
My name is Alya Alkaabi, a 22 year old Qatari artist. In my practice, I seek inspiration from the beauty in the mundane, the everyday and the surreal. My art is what my mind sees, just like cloud watching people, they see a lot of shaped clouds and I see my next new painting.
For this project I sought inspiration from my grandfather’s poetry archives, scribbled on random pieces of paper, receipts, and notebooks, showing the wear and tear of time. I was interested in the juxtaposition of his words and their implied meanings, describing the seafaring life from a subjective and deeply personal perspective, with the visual imagery of the sea.
My grandfather, Ibrahim, was the captain, Al-Nokhatha, an old Gulf term for the owner and captain of a fishing and trading ship. He used to sail for months for pearl diving with his friends. Ibrahim was a published poet, he would write poems about Qatar, the sea, the pearls, love and many more.
My project is to showcase some of his poems onto the canvas mimicking the sea. To create the effect of the sea on the canvas, I worked with a 6 meters long canvas fabric, which I kept in water and blue ink for 4 days. A video of the ocean with the poetry on top sliding through the canvas just like the waves. The handwritten poems in a display covered with acrylic in front of the canvas for the viewer to see it.
نركب سفن دلجه بها نضرب يواش … والموج من شد الهوى فوقنا يطيش
نصبر على ذاك التعب فيه والراش … لو كان فيه من العنا حاجة العيش