Streams Move Oceans

Athr Gallery is pleased to present Streams Move Oceans, Zahrah Al-Ghamdi’s solo Exhibition. Al-Ghamdi examines love, fragility and the complex and opposing duality of relationships as the basis of social living. Be it a connection between people or elements, ties are created to form an exchange of diverse associations and pace resulting in intricate knots. To the unsuspecting eye, the picture looks uniform and clear, what lies beneath however is infinite connections and layers of complexity and possibilities that which create our rich existential heritage. Each movement of these weaves and ties carry its risks and hopes of building or breaking the bearings of our social structures. Every one of these microscopic links represents a relation between elements, individuals, brushing off surfaces and forming new and sometimes improbable perspectives. It is in these trivial looking streams that the energy establishes the mass and backbone of all living structures
Surrounding us.

Using mud and clay, Al-Ghamdi fuses opposing elements of liquid and solid giving ground for attachment and form. Textiles are dipped in plaster and knotted together to make a large relic like piece, telling of a rich and latent meaning. The effect that it leaves us with is one of a deeply rooted history of craft which the artist sprucely draws from in her practice to convey elaborate concepts and ideas. Manipulating earthly matter, the artist creates a site-specific installation where the gallery becomes a witness of the phenomenon of interconnectedness from the simplest gestures to an elegy and portrait on the ancestral foundation of our living. Here Al Ghamdi makes a plea calling for the acknowledgement of our co-existence proposing her perspective on the essential elements that construct and give meaning and life to it all.