Dahlia Elsayed - Statement

Artist Statement

Writing and painting have always been close processes for me. Since childhood, I have kept painted journals, using images overlapped with text. The work has developed from book art to work on paper to large-scale installation paintings, that use image and text to create detailed, visual narratives of locations and experience.

The work draws on my surroundings, informed by autobiography and environment, creating contemporary cartographies of memory, place and dislocation. Part data-tracking, part topography, these conceptual maps examine the aesthetic surfaces and ephemeral cultural markers of recent immigrant populations, of which I am a product. My recent work explores the idea of emotional landmarks. These journalistic, text-driven, paintings are records of internal and external geographies. Often they describe the most mundane details: weather, high tide schedules, detailed menus, street names.

My interest in mapping or documenting place is personal: my family has relocated from country to country in the past three generations due to political strife. This has fostered in me the idea that cities are less shaped by architectural layouts and more by the social experiences and memories that occurred there.