FOLDED CANVASES

Over an artistic career spanning more than two decades, Shaqayeq Arabi has continually moved between abstract and evocative painting and tactile, three-dimensional structures and installations. Her practice is characterised by an experimental approach to materials, transformation, and reuse, often incorporating objects and fragments collected from industrial and urban environments.

Arabi’s works have been created using a wide range of materials, including plastic bottles, newspapers, used wallpapers, and found objects. By removing these everyday materials from their original contexts, she transforms them into new forms, allowing their previous lives and associations to become part of the artwork.

In Folded Canvases, Arabi turns this process of transformation towards her own artistic history. She recycles her old paintings, folding, reshaping, and reconstructing them to create new cultural forms. Works that once existed as two-dimensional paintings are physically altered and given a new…