The rust bleeds on the material in a way that is reminiscent of watercolours. Instead of canvas, the work bears oxidised patterns on silk, six metres long and a little over a metre in width.
In fact, the welcoming work that viewers will first see when they walk into the space is likely Al Astad’s dearest of the bunch. The fine-tuning of Al Astad’s technique is axiomatic in the works on display in his solo exhibition Another Perspective, which is showing at the Cultural Foundation until September 20.
#Silk elements how to#
It doesn’t know how to draw a horse, so I make the silhouette of a horse in iron, bury it in sand, and it gives me its own variation of it. It’s as if nature is asking me to make art with it.
“I’m talking with the sand, to that heat, to that pressure. “It is a conversation with the beach,” he says. It is a technique Al Astad has spent the last 24 years developing, an artistic collaboration, he says, with the sea that has captivated him since he was a boy, collecting seashells and chasing seagulls on the shore. Mohamed Al Astad ditched traditional artist tools in favour of nature to create some of his works on show. He then washes the canvas in the sea to remove any excess rust, waste and sand, before taking it home and washing it again, this time with fresh water, to rid the canvas of any salt remnants that may cause the fibres to deteriorate. He then leaves them there for a week, returning to find that the oxidisation process has left the orange-brown prints on the canvas. The Emirati artist takes regular excursions to the beaches of the country, particularly of his home town of Khor Fakkan, to bury large canvases along with pieces of iron along the shoreline. Sand, saltwater, time and rust are among Mohamed Al Astad’s favourite tools as an artist.
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