Exhibition Statement

This exhibition is a gathering of forms that have emerged in the five years after I arrived in Egypt. I learnt the word لسهّ†متحلش†, or ‘ Lis-a-ma hel sitch’, as I understood it, soon after I arrived. I thought it meant ‘Yet not finished’. But ‘Not yet solved’ is a better translation.

I moved from Berlin to Fayoum in Egypt in 2018 to make The Embraces -- a series of papier mache forms. I hoped the heat of the Saharan sun would dry their glueypaper quickly enough to allow for a continual flow of construction. I wanted to see what forms would emerge from the systematic interaction between the ‘bodily geometry’ of my arm, which can make differently angled triangles when I bend my elbow, and real geometric shapes - flat circles of different sizes. Constructing within the space of my ‘hugging’ arms would, I hoped, develop the patient attentiveness of my sense of touch, rather than the judgements of my eyes.

A family firm of paper importers in Cairo kindly gave me a hundred kilograms of blank newsprint. It arrived as huge sheets but I needed little pieces. A new bi-lingual friend in the village helped me compose a paragraph of ‘Arabic’ so I could ask a few neighbours to help me tear it. After a few days spent memorising what I hoped would be recognisable words, I set off to visit a few women who were welcoming when I passed their homes on my morning walks. I took some paper strips to demonstrate tearing into bits –

het-tet soghyara, , (“pieces, little”), I said, bringing out a half-finished test sculpture.

Lis - a - ma hel sitch, (“It’s not yet finished”), I’d added, handing it over.

As the forms became independent beings, the unarticulated low lying emotional knowledge that began them was lived through and with, rather than resolved. They can be wobbled or spun. Reaching around their finished forms generates a bodily memory of the years when I made the same movement to feel each object’s progress as it gradually accumulated to fill the space within my hug-forming arms. That is often how I find my way - my physical dimensions and sensory capabilities are a steady resource that guide the parameters of construction. A seed of solitude I feel within - whilst living amongst a community that welcomes but confuses me, and loving people far away, and some who have died - also germinates in the sculptures as the making process rolled on.

Alongside The Embraces are forms made from handblown glass, polished clay, cast metal, wet moulded leather and woven wool, as well as some drawn on paper. In one room hangs the four-sided, spinning backstrap loom that I designed, built and and wove on for over two years (A bridge to cross as I come to it). The carpet- form was finally opened into its full form during the exhibition opening. A short film,(Georgina Sleap’s studio, 11min) shows how it grew in my studio, while life - dull of birds, cats, sounds and seasons - carried on beyond my balcony in Faggala, the neighbourhood of Cairo which has become my home. Many of the wide variety of workshops and material sellers have been here for generations. My work depends on the woodturners, weavers, paper sellers and glassblowers who have become friends and collaborators.

Some materials and skills come from journeys beyond Cairo. The clay used for the small forms in the work entitled The Winter of Rowan and Iris are from Al Nazla, a village where Nile made has been mixed with kiln ash and formed into the same design of globe-like vessels for thousands of years. I took a suitcase full when I returned to my family home in the UK ‘for covid’…. Where I discovered another material with an ancient heritage - leather from a village where people have been tanning cowhides with Oak bark from a nearby woodland since the time of the Romans. My childhood bedroom became a studio - a place to understand the relationship of clay and leather, the birth of Rowan and death of Iris.

In continuing my practice of investigating my self as much as the materials around me, my physical dimensions and sensory capabilities became the resource to guide the parameters and character of the forms as they grew.