Heavy Petals, 2024

Heavy Petals is a sculptural installation that incorporates elements from a photographic archive belonging to Claudette, the artist’s late grandmother. The work revisits how floral motifs adorned Claudette’s home and garments. Working from these images, the sculpture takes the form of atrophied roses falling atop each other, as if a mound of grief and a site for collective mourning.

Having a unique bilingual title, the Arabic ح د د weaves together the etymology of the root ḥadad as an alliteration on ḥadid (steel) or ḥaddad (blacksmith) and ḥidad (mourning). Working with steel, an emblem of resilience, the artist speculatively revisits these inaccessible memories. The garden of colossal metal roses simultaneously evokes the common opening gesture in classical Arabic poetry of Al Atlal, which translates to the ruins or remnants. It usually consists of describing a scene of desolation and decay, evoking feelings of nostalgia, loss, and the passage of time, honoring the memories associated with those ruins. The artist draws on her knowledge of fabrics to lend the metal a quality of softness. The act of working with steel is a way of tending to an intergenerational garden, ensuring that it is not forgotten or displaced but continuously expanded upon. 

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Heavy Petals

ح د د 

2025

Steel, dimensions variable, approx. h. 3 × w. 10 × d. 10 m

Commissioned by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation for the Islamic Arts Biennale 2025