Soraya

My artwork is diverse. I produce drawings, prints, collage, books and other objects. My focus is on drawing, but drawing in its broadest sense, with scissors, tin snips, on lithography stone. It’s about making shapes and the spaces within a line.

I am interested in the daily rituals of life and the relationship of the domestic environment with the outside world. I work from a home-based studio. I am drawn to found materials that carry particular associations.

My current projects include a reinterpretation of Renaissance portraits, using recycled tin cans, cut and riveted together. I am also developing cutout and collage works using patterned paper from the inside of business envelopes. These feature traditional art subjects, still-life and the human figure from life.

I conceive some work in response to location and am equally happy working on large pieces or on an intimate scale. In the spring of 2009 I undertook a project called A Cake For Every Day, which was made in co-operation with a small independent bakery in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Each day a different cake was made and placed centre stage in the shop window to be seen, bought and consumed.

I also made a series of prints of cakes and bread that were exhibited alongside photographs of the bakery and shop. The project has a website www.acakeforeveryday.com and will develop into a book. The idea was inspired by a 1919’s cake recipe book, The Everyday Cake Book.

I am now in my eighth year of keeping Scrap Diaries. Each day I select a memento from the day’s activities. It is fixed and dated in a book, hand-made from folded DL envelopes. Bus or exhibition tickets or shopping receipts take on a new significance when archived in this way. As individual objects they are mundane but stuck into books they take on a more serious intent, a desire to reflect/recall the passing of time, different phases of a life: children growing, the death of a parent. This ‘minutiae of memory’ parallels the written diary but gives the viewer more scope for personal reflection. Reducing the diary to an essence, a single scrap note means the reading of it is more fluid. When you write a diary it fixes your response, mood and feeling about that day’s events but the scraps allow freedom to interpret the day in light of the present.

Through a friendship with the late Architect Enric Miralles I was given the opportunity in 2002 to be part of the Scottish Parliament project team and was responsible for the design of The Cannongate Wall on the Royal Mile, a 30-metre wall leading to the Parliamentarians’ entrance. The wall is a montage of Scottish stone, text pieces and drawn line on cast concrete.

I completed an Art Foundation course at Chelsea College of Art and a B.A in Fine Art at Middlesex Polytechnic in London followed by an M.A at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle.