ABSENT FALL by Sawsan Al Bahar

This work is the latest of site-specific installations in which Sawsan Al Bahar (b. 1989, Damascus, Syria) plays with the visible and the invisible. The artist creates a sculptural spectacle with a 100 transparent tree leaves and a found cardboard box. Each leaf is uniquely made through image mapping, then 3d printed and moulded by hand. The suspended vertical fall of transparent leaves tumbling out of a box and floating mid-air creates an evocative image of lost fall leaves. The delicate ghostly sculptures express fragility and temporality - foregrounding the intangible forces of time, gravity, and air. The artist’s manipulation of materials extends to transforming the exhibition space itself, where she literally is making ‘a drawing in space’.  Viewers experience form as both absence and present. Seen from different view points, the leaves oscillate between being both there and barely there, appearing and disappearing momentarily, suspended in a state of both movement and rest.

 

The purposeful use of materials that are artificial highlights and challenges our relationship with the natural world. We experience the machine made, handmade and natural simultaneously. The transparency is a reminder of the ephemeral nature of the artwork but also of nature and life itself.