Shadows at Play
Text by Nadine Khalil
At the time we speak, wire sculptures have begun to take over Alia Hussain Lootah’s studio. Some of them look like root vegetables presented in pairs or connected by one stem.
What initially began as floating biomorphic forms on pastel paper during the pandemic (Object series) has evolved into levitating iterations in sculptural wire. They are airy, with gaps between knitted aluminum wires expressing Lootah’s visual language of intersecting circles. She draws these on paper to fill in a body. The sculptures are playful both in the way they are moulded — morphing, stretching, connecting — and in the resourcefulness embedded in them. To make one for example, a hula hoop is transformed into a loom.
Lootah is always looking around for everyday tools and objects at home that can be used to make art. Her art practice is communal to a certain extent as she invites friends and family to participate in knitting circles. She says there is something lonely about motherhood, but she learns from her children. When her daughter began knitting hats for example, she was inspired by the technique, which then gave rise to her sculptures.
Their titles are numbers, indexing the amount of time needed to make each one. Time for a young mother is important: how does one play within limits of structure and childcare? This is a question Lootah asks. The element of containment in her work reflects her lifestyle and responds to a certain lack of control around daily circumstances such as the duration of chores or unexpected illness.
Linear Presence reflects this fragmentation or interruption of time in a modular composition. It also echoes a movement outward from focusing on a central figure in the work. Made using acrylic markers of different thicknesses on sand-colored canvas, Lootah was interested in the overlapping and intermingling of shapes rather than the singular form. This series emerged from the shadows cast by the sculptures, which the artist noticed when she was working one night. She then used an old school projector to accentuate the shadows and create black filled-in silhouettes — reflecting the original 3D sculpture. The live shadows in contrast, are drawn with curly lines like the configuration that makes up her sculptures. In a way, this presents a reversal of positive and negative space.
In Lootah’s work, the relationships that unfold between a skeletal figure and its shadow, between light and darkness, form and void, are apparent in the ways different elements interlock in her Figuration series. At times they appear like different sides of the same thing.
Using a wiggle pen on paper, she also retreats into aspects of her childhood that she remembers, pushing the limits in marking and defining her work. Like a pulse, her slanted lines start and stop in a rhythm she cannot entirely control, subject to the pen’s engines. She likens it to the rhythm of an inkjet printer. Here her drawings have evolved from the sculptures instead of the other way around. They are no longer the blueprint, constrained and precise maps for a 3D object. Less about enfoldment, one starts to see a bird, or an amorphous bone — the beginning of something.
