When London-based Lebanese artist Aya Haidar was a child, a friend asked what her mother did and she responded: “Nothing. She’s just a housewife.” She recalls her father scolding her, and this memory stayed with her over the years, as her perspectives of motherhood, domesticity and productivity evolved. “I think a lot about how in society, we attribute nothingness to a mother’s role, which is the most important role,” Aya, now a mother of four, tells MOJEH. “I mean, you are shaping the minds of the next generation.”
Aya’s own childhood included frequent visits to her grandmother’s house, where the two would cook, sew, knit and mend clothes together. “We never had a conversation without our hands being busy — stitching was a language that was inherently part of my upbringing,” says Aya. With furniture and windows always adorned with antique fabrics passed down through the generations, she inherited an appreciation for textiles: “It was part of my visual landscape, growing up.” Aya enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and travelled to the School of Art Institute of Chicago for an exchange programme. It was her exposure here, to the fibre materials department, where Aya discovered her calling as a textile designer. “Until then, I’d never married conceptual art with textiles, which I thought were more practical — you just sew to mend, and knit to clothe yourself. But sewing, in textile art, is actually very political,” she says.
Earlier this year, Tabari Artspace displayed one of Aya’s embroidered pieces, entitled Final Goodbye, depicting a woman embracing the shrouded body of a civilian child killed in conflict. Reflective of the dire situation in Gaza, where children are being orphaned and entire families are being massacred, Aya’s embroidery speaks volumes. She will be returning to the UAE with Tabari Artspace for the next season of Art Dubai, creating a piece for the working theme Routes to Roots. “I'm looking at our history and greater identity, tied to the land, food and produce — because it isn’t just being occupied, it’s being absolutely desecrated and poisoned,” she explains.
Wearing a keffiyeh stylishly tied at the top of her head like a turban when we meet over video call, Aya is vocal and upfront about her solidarity with Palestine and her belief in the importance of preserving the culture of the region through embroidery techniques like tatreez. In 2023, she was invited by curator Rachel Dedman to take part in the third iteration of the exhibition Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. She contributed with Safe Spaces — a series of embroidery hoops depicting scenes inspired by her family memories from Lebanon’s Civil War.
“Men fight with swords, women fight with the needle,” is a quote from the exhibition that resonated profoundly with Aya: “It’s so poetic and true — when you think of resistance, you think of men fighting on the front line but actually, it’s women sitting at home who are keeping heritage alive by stitching, despite the occupation’s active destruction of heritage.” Seeing how crafting has historically flourished within women’s collectives, in their homes while telling stories with children playing by their feet, Aya believes that sewing and embroidery can be acts of feminism. This sentiment climaxed with her exhibition Highly Strung, which featured ordinary items related to motherhood and domesticity — such as dish towels and baby onesies — embroidered with menial tasks of motherhood.
Changing a nappy, breastfeeding, tidying up or renewing library cards are day-to-day tasks that piled up with no tangible outcome to show for her productivity, and during the Covid lockdown in London, Aya discovered just how time-consuming it all was. “It’s something that’s completely undervalued in society. I was doing all the childcare until the evening, I was homeschooling, queuing for ages at the supermarket, and I was just absolutely exhausted. So I started archiving it. I wrote an act of invisible labour that I did for each day of the year.” At the end of the project, she had embroidered these 365 moments on household textiles and clothing. “Slowly the work built, becoming this physical, tangible, monstrous form,” says Aya, whose project was eventually acquired by the Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi. She priced the work at minimum wage, multiplied by 24 hours, seven days a week and 365 days in a year — because, a mother never clocks off. “The pricing of the work is intrinsic to the concept, because it’s in a language that we understand in our society, which is money,” explains Aya, who calls Highly Strung her most “passive-aggressive” body of work. The 365 pieces were all crafted during the night — after her children went to sleep. “I’m with the kids all day, full-time,” she tells MOJEH. “They go to bed at seven and that’s when my studio time begins.”
From reading books at bedtime to weaving narratives through textiles, Aya is a storyteller of unique sorts — which made her the optimal artist for her latest commission, which she had been working on over the past year. She was recruited by Up Projects to lead an art initiative for the community of Whitechapel in London, that would engage its people and culminate in the creation of a light piece referencing the history of the East End area.
Aya explains that Whitechapel has undergone many changes over the years — in the 19th and 20th centuries it was a hub for Jewish immigration, before becoming a popular settlement for Bangladeshis in Britain. The white Cockney generation in Whitechapel is a minority now — and likely will only be alive for another two to three decades. “When the Bengali community came in, the pubs, which are very much part of the fabric of London, closed down, as well as the fish and chips and pie and mash shops, and then mosques started to pop up,” says Aya. “Such a malleable thing like the demographic of a place can change the physical landscape of an area, and I was really interested in tracing back that history.”
Aya worked with a local majority-Bengali school and a group called the Bow Geezers, which included Cockney men in their 80s and 90s, to discuss identity — their own, and of Whitechapel. “I wanted to have open and honest conversations because there’s a lot of cancel culture we’ve created for ourselves across the UK when we talk about race, religion or migration — you can’t debate things anymore,” explains Aya. “When you have a home and then it’s overlayed with something that’s so wildly different, there is an erosion, and I can understand the grievances of the host community. To avoid all that, there has to be some kind of transparency and some kind of conversation.”
Aya ultimately found that while the communities may have different experiences and memories of Whitechapel, they shared many commonalities. “The running trends were exactly the same,” she says. “The market was the breathing core of growing up in Whitechapel, they spoke about playing sports in the street and at the local park, respecting family elders, and food was also a really big one — for some it was pakoras and curries, for others it was cockles and fish and chips.” Teaming up with musical director Tom Carradine, Aya embarked on the second part of the project: “We wrote a really buoyant and playful song, in the old Cockney, East End spirit, with lyrics that told their conjoined story — a love story for Whitechapel.”
A verse from the chorus of this song formed the final light piece and it was displayed across the wall of the Town Hall in October, followed by an event at the Whitechapel gallery to discuss the work.
Shortly after the creative discussions came to a close, race riots erupted across London, bringing conversations about immigration and Islamophobia to the fore and making the installation — plus the messages it embraces — extremely timely. “This project is so important as it demystifies the idea that these two different groups are so disparate — because they’re not,” emphasises Aya. “Themes like the importance of family and community connect people. They might be different flavours — literally — but actually, the values are the same.”
Art, in this way, brought the two communities in East London together, and Aya emphasises the power of craft when it comes to communication, and even healing. Earlier this year, she worked with the UK’s National Health Service on a session exploring how stitching can provide support and therapy, and she tells MOJEH that there are mental health benefits to the craft. “It has actually been scientifically proven that the bilateral movement — the back and forth of the stitch — is incredibly regulating and comforting, and has the same effect as when you go for a walk or run,” she explains. Aya witnessed this recently while working with female victims of domestic violence living in sheltered accommodation in Cambridge. “What we were making wasn’t important; it was about busying our hands, and I think when you busy your hands you speak, and you feel freer,” she says.
“I’m not a therapist and I don’t claim to be — but I really believe in the power of craft as therapy.”
