They spin cocoons, and then...

Nur Elmessiri sees both loveliness and its flipside in Ekram Mohamed Omar's textile works
Birds and trees, when embroidered and colourful, take us to Akhmim -- a visual framework that could constitute a mental point of departure from which to launch an odyssey through Ekram Mohamed Omar's exhibition at Safar Khan gallery. The rural-idyllic and communitarian world of Akhmim, however, turns its back not only on the ugly socio-economic truths that come with such lovely concepts as "the land" (for example, the exploitation of labour), but also -- and here Omar's textilic paintings are a radical departure from the Akhmim frame of mind -- on one of the fundamental facts of natural life: death.
Omar's textilic paintings are meticulously executed. Every thread, every appliquéed bit of coarse cloth, stitch and painted line has formal dignity. She has a sense of medium, a respect for the vehicle of her expression, thread and fabric, which she takes the trouble to work thoroughly and which she does not merely use negligently as a means to a formal end. The natural nature of her medium -- its origin, after all, was the cotton field -- is something which, once the viewer has looked closely (surprised that watercolours can be conjured up from fabric), slowly filters through the mind's eye.
As does the mortality lurking within all that loveliness.
Flowers can be pressed, can be made, even in cotton, to resemble paper. This Omar does in at least two of the works on exhibit. Poppies, translucent as poppies are when they have been preserved between the leaves of a hard-bound book. Oversized poppies, monstrously transformed, in terms of scale at least, into trees in the shade of which something golden, delicately stitched -- a dead bird -- lies atop a white feathery cenotaph.
Nest shapes are also cocoon shapes, Omar's sensitivity to the potential of her medium reveals. Follow the thin brocade-like yellow spiralling line, and at its heart is a chick that had almost made it through the embryonic -- dead: a drop of daffodil yellow, with red stitches denoting claws. A creature that has not quite emerged in full form from the grey-brown stuff of labyrinthine gestation.
In a formally parallel piece, we know that the yellow imperfect circle stitched on brown and grey and set in a sea of blue fabric is a nest because the red creature at the centre is alive. Elsewhere, cradle shapes floating (up in the sky? down river to bulrushes where they might be found?) on feathery blue string bear red crucifixes across the arms of which white albatrosses spread their sacrificial wings. And beneath the weight of layer upon layer of appliquéed blue, brown and cobalt wave-shapes into which cobalt poppies sink their tentaclular roots and above which an Icarus-like bird plummets towards the waves, floats a white shape carefully constructed/contorted into an arch: intimations of the silk worms which in childhood never quite made it beyond the chrysalis.
Amazing that with such pretty colours and motifs -- birds, plants, blues, greens and yellows -- Ekram Omar can evoke such dark embryonic depths, with such a homely activity -- stitching, patchwork -- can touch the sensitive nerve of the mythical, can with opaque material intimate the shimmering transparency of foetal matter, and water.
Genesis and perspective emerges, uncoils and unwinds from the centrepoint of a canvas. Stories are spun. A finely woven fabric is dyed black, then blue, and on the foam -- white thread stitched on to the blue -- are black shapes, naiads, their hair the foam on the sea, tree trunks sprouting green leaves. Once upon a time.
Dominating the exhibition is a huge landscape, an idyllic scene like a child's watercolour. A toy boat sails on a sea blending into sky. The horizon curves up in a semi circle. Eight trees in the foreground, on a carpet of grass decorated, naturally (in this an Edenic watercolour), with flowers and birds, grow towards each other and at their highest branches join. Except this is not, contrary to what photographs of this work might lead one to conclude, a watercolour. This is fabric, thread, fine embroidery. This, like Akhmim work, is patient stitching. But unlike Akhmim, it is faux naïve, naïve only in the way that an artist who can convincingly, and with an uncanny simplicity that speaks of sophistication, stitch together a creature -- part corpse on bier, part cactus, part mermaid -- can be naïve. More crafty this than arts and crafts, and more individualistic, for better or for worse.
The dark, the delicately shimmering -- and in embroidered palm trees the sheerly lovely. Palm trees of bounty, colourful (brown, deep orange, green and green) palm trees showering the ground beneath them with dates, sweet, ripe and elegantly spaced. They dance, almost, hug, almost, border the anthropomorphic but do not make the fatal cross-over -- something which her drawings in pencil and pastels do risk -- into cute-land.
Possible, Ekram Omar's work testifies, to rejoice in the beauty of a countryside stitched through with needle and thread. To do this while acknowledging that life and death are as two peas in a pod (and with such a fine sense of her medium) is no small achievement.
For exhibition details, see Listings
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