From Thread to Stone

My earliest memories of art are not tied to an exhibition or a classroom, but to a woman hunched over fabric, a needle in her hand, embroidering wild animals with thread. My grandmother, who started sewing at fourteen and became a single mother at nineteen, worked as a seamstress, self-taught in everything that mattered: copying designs of modern dresses she saw in magazines, creating her own patterns and inventing new designs when materials were scarce – all while learning to support a household of women and children through her work. My grandmother would access these magazines, brought back by those who travelled between the city and her hometown, Ash-Shihr, whenever she could, stitching memories into objects meant to be worn and eventually worn out. She embroidered life into dresses: tigers, flowers, leaves and stars.

Gender and representation in Yemen

Yemen’s relationship to figurative representation has been shaped by shifting regional, religious and historical contexts. South Yemen, officially the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, developed mostly as a secular society and public murals, political posters and sculpture were visible across Aden, the capital at the time. Even earlier, under British colonial rule (1839–1967), statues such as the monument of Queen Victoria in the district of Tawahi formed part of the city’s visual landscape. Figurative imagery was not inherently absent from Yemeni public life. However, following the country’s unification with North Yemen in 1990, many of these visual forms were gradually removed, defaced or left to deteriorate as political and religious sensibilities shifted.1

From the early 1990s onward, pan-Islamic movements gained increased influence over public moral discourse and figurative imagery became more contested in civic space. Representational art was often restricted, particularly works depicting living beings. Religious conservatism, influenced by imported Wahhabi ideology, further shaped these restrictions by promoting the belief that creating such likenesses was a divine prerogative.2 Teachers warned us that representing living beings intruded upon divine creation and would result in punishment in the afterlife. What had once been commonplace became morally suspect. Notably, while many socialist-era murals and sculptures disappeared, the statue of Queen Victoria in Tawahi, built during British colonial rule, remains; an uneven survival.

My grandmother, who was born under British colonial rule in the eastern region of Hadramaut, belonged to a generation for whom girls’ education was severely limited outside the urban centre of Aden.3 Unlike her I was born in a city, Aden, where I had access to education and grew up amid a mix of post-Marxism and Wahhabist influences in the 1990s. Despite the restrictions in place in my school, my grandmother quietly nurtured my artistic inclinations. She made me dresses that were embroidered with flowers, crafted my school uniform and created what would become my favourite dress, which was silver and had butterfly wings. She looked at my drawings like they were maps of something real, framing two of them, as if they were not merely sketches but finished works worth preserving and displaying. In my grandmother’s world, where most women’s given names slipped quietly from daily use, she was the first to say: ‘Keep going’.4

When the war in Yemen (2014–present) escalated in 2015, I left the country to pursue a postgraduate degree in the United Kingdom. Before the war, I had worked in the department of women’s rights at the Ministry of Human Rights and, as the conflict intensified, women activists like me became targets.5 Because of my work in women’s rights, returning to Sana’a, where my family moved when I was fourteen, is currently not possible. My family home was located only a short distance from a military airbase that became a frequent target of air strikes, and the surrounding neighbourhood experienced repeated bombardment, forcing my family to leave. Building on my work in Yemen, I completed a master’s degree in Post-War Recovery and Reconstruction, which shaped my understanding of how cultural heritage, memory and identity survive conflict and displacement. I did not realise that pursuing a degree abroad would become permanent exile; to this day I have been prevented from returning to Sana’a. I continue my advocacy from the UK, focusing mainly on women in Yemen.6

For five years, until my grandmother’s death, I held onto the hope that I would see her again. The physical distance transformed our relationship into one mediated entirely through memory, often distorted, fragmentary and haunted by absence. My personal connection to my homeland and lineage is now physically inaccessible. There was no archive left behind, only the work of my grandmother’s hands. No sketchbooks, no letters, just garments and fragments, memories of how she held a piece of soap to draw on fabric and how she paused before making a cut. This embodied archive forms the foundation of my artistic practice and research into matrilineal knowledge transmission.

Embodied knowledge and the unwritten archive

Embodied knowledge refers to understanding gained through physical practice, transmitted through demonstration rather than documentation. In Yemen, women’s creativity has historically existed in such margins: henna patterns on skin, songlines in kitchens, embroidery that maps the soul of a region. These practices are often dismissed as craft, as domestic, as disposable. Yet contained within them is a sophisticated understanding of balance, line, patience and improvisation; artistic principles passed from mother to daughter through touch and observation.

The dresses women embroidered carried messages about regional identity, family history and personal expression, developing a visual language entirely outside formal art education or recognition. Regional variations in dress created a visual cartography of identity. In Hadramaut, where my grandmother lived, women wore dresses called dheil wa gadmah (ذيل وقدمه), made from lighter fabrics like cotton or voile.7 Practical for the coastal heat, they featured colourful embroidery in reds, greens and yellows. Hadhrami garments were characterised by front-opening designs with button closures and breathable materials. The embroidery also carried social markers: floral motifs for married women, geometric patterns for unmarried girls and specific colour combinations that indicated family lineage. These dresses, often worn with the Hadhrami silver belt on special occasions, created a visual language of identity that women like my grandmother could read, instantly knowing a woman’s origin, marital status and family connections from the patterns stitched into her dress.

Dresses produced in Aden reflected the port city’s cosmopolitan character, incorporating motifs influenced by trade with India and Southeast Asia. In the highlands of Taiz, women favoured richer colours and geometric patterns, whereas Sana’a was known for its heavy black velvet, adorned with intricate gold tilla work. These regional variations created a visual language transmitted through women’s hands rather than through formal documentation. Passed on through demonstration, from mother to daughter, this knowledge was never written down but preserved in the muscle memory of hands moving thread through fabric.

The Uzbek artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova alludes to these forms of knowledge transmission when she describes ‘the Central Asian female world ... connected to local forms of knowledge that have survived religious and political transformations ... a space where beliefs, rituals, and traditions about being deeply bound to and dependent on our environment, on animal and vegetative worlds, are guarded by women’.8 Like Ismailova, I see my grandmother’s practice as safeguarding knowledge that might otherwise be lost to political upheaval and cultural displacement.

Historically, Yemen’s artistic environment was influenced by class restrictions, religious iconoclasm and colonial legacies. British rule in South Yemen introduced Western artforms – architecture, sculpture and memorials – particularly in Aden, while the subsequent socialist period resulted an influx of Soviet-trained artists who created public murals and figurative sculptures. However, artistic production was predominantly male and confined to urban centers. Meanwhile, women’s creativity remained restricted to socially accepted but marginalised forms, all transmitted between women in private gatherings: pattern designs; henna; decorated breads and cakes; textiles; embroidery; and oral traditions, including poetry, such as the balah form, storytelling cycles, proverbs and songs marking life transitions from birth to mourning.

Yemeni cultural institutions tend to reduce what were considered ‘feminine’ arts to secondary status, making them vulnerable to erasure under pressures of modernisation, displacement and conflict. Yet some practices persist and even intensify as acts of cultural preservation. Weddings, despite being smaller and more subdued, still feature traditional dress and embroidery work passed between generations. These spaces represent crucial sites of cultural continuity even amid ongoing violence. Women document traditional dress on social media platforms, sharing photographs of regional dresses despite facing criticism for their online visibility. Individual activists, cultural practitioners and artists have launched regional and national projects to preserve textile traditions threatened by displacement and loss of intergenerational transmission.

The war’s assault on cultural memory

Since 2015, war between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition has created what the United Nations has called the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.9 The war has displaced between 4.5 and 4.8 million Yemenis internally, but its impact extends beyond immediate displacement to the systematic targeting of cultural infrastructure supporting artistic traditions.10 Air strikes have damaged the historic centre of Sana’a, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and destroyed museums, archaeological sites and cultural institutions, heritage that ‘bears the soul of the Yemeni people ... is a symbol of a millennial history of knowledge and ... belongs to all humankind’.11 Yet the destruction has reached beyond physical landmarks to private domestic spaces. When families are displaced, when traditional communities scatter across borders, when grandmothers pass on, the archives of women’s embodied knowledge transmitted in these spaces cannot be salvaged through conventional heritage preservation protocols.

The careers of contemporary Yemeni artists illustrate how creative practice has been shaped by political constraints, displacement and migration. Many women artists now work outside the country, negotiating visibility from abroad while maintaining connections to Yemen.12 Boushra Almutawakel (born 1969) interrogates representation and veiling through staged photographic series that question who controls the image of Yemeni woman. Shatha Altowai (born 1989) addresses women’s agency and peacebuilding through film and painting, while Thana Faroq (born 1990) uses photography and installation to explore intergenerational trauma and migration in the diaspora. Shaima Al-Tamimi’s (born 1984) multimedia work examines her family’s generational migration from Yemen to East Africa to the Gulf, and Yasmine Nasser Diaz, a Los Angeles-based artist, uses collage, fibre etchings and installation to explore the emotional landscape of women in exile and third-culture identity. Yemeni artists increasingly use installation, performance and digital media to document displacement and fractured belonging. Their practices, like mine, navigate memory, gender and public space, although my work turns specifically to material inheritance through stone.

The war has disrupted networks of traditional knowledge – the informal systems through which women shared techniques, patterns and stories – through displacement, death and the collapse of social structures. These constraints have added new levels of cultural control to existing patriarchal standards that already limited women’s artistic independence and public recognition.

A material dialogue from thread to stone

My art practice in stone carving, drawing and sculpture begins with this silent matrilineal archive. I draw from my grandmother’s gestures, her resourcefulness, her refusal to give in. Each mark, cut, or weight becomes a way of speaking with her, building dialogue between what was not documented and what still needs to be said.

Within the growing Yemeni artistic diaspora in London, Edinburgh, Berlin and Amman, many artists address displacement through photography, film and digital media, often working with archival recovery or crisis imagery. Rather than documenting rupture through photography or film, I work through it physically by carving.

I trained in Historic and Architectural Carving at City & Guilds of London Art School between 2021 and 2023 (figs.1–2) and in my final year I was awarded a scholarship to complete a year-long programme at the Florence Academy of Art, where I focused on anatomy, gesture and the capturing of the human form in clay and drawing. My approach is shaped by my training at City and Guilds of London Art School, where I studied under the artist and memorial carver Charlotte Howarth. Translating private, gendered subjects – domestic objects, women’s undergarments and the material culture of women’s lives – into monumental forms, Howarth challenges the division between domestic life and public memorial.

I aim to extend this inquiry in my own practice toward matrilineal knowledge specific to Yemen. While representations of Yemen abroad are frequently shaped by conflict imagery, I carve thread spools, sewing tools and embroidery patterns. In doing so, I shift attention from rupture to continuity. Women’s creative practices are socially foundational yet rarely documented, and increasingly endangered by generational rupture. I am interested in making work that resists obsolescence, materially and culturally, resisting cycles of disappearance. Working in exile complicates recollection, as memory becomes partial and unstable.

When I work with stone, I begin by drawing on its surface with charcoal or chalk, repeatedly drawing and erasing until I reach the desired design (fig.3). This process of iteration and refinement mirrors my grandmother’s approach to patterns. When I draw, I let my lines wander like hers did, wild and intuitive. The body of work Thread and Stone 2023–ongoing represents the two inheritances my grandmother gave me: the softness of care and the weight of survival.

She stitched her resistance quietly; I carve mine, loudly.

This material dialogue extends beyond metaphor into methodology. I frequently incorporate textile techniques into sculptural practice, wrapping stone elements in fabric or carving patterns derived from traditional Yemeni textile motifs. Stone carving has historically commemorated male achievements – military victories, political leaders – while women’s domestic work is rarely memorialised. The juxtaposition of ‘feminine’ textile work with the ‘masculine’ tradition of stone carving deliberately challenges gendered hierarchies in art history that have historically devalued women’s creative contributions.

Thread Memory 2023 is a hand-carved stone depicting spools of thread, buttons and flowing thread lines (figs.4–5). When making this work, I focused on small, humble objects that my grandmother used daily but that are easily overlooked: thread spools, buttons. I drew these directly onto the limestone with chalk and charcoal, repeatedly marking and erasing until the design emerged. I chose limestone both for its softness and responsiveness to fine carving, and for its permanence, making fragile textile motifs endure in a material associated with architecture and monuments. The stone was carved using a mallet and chisel. The carving process mirrored embroidery itself: repetitive, meditative and patient. Each groove represents a stitch, building the image line by line. Thread Memory is the only stone carving I have completed, although I plan to create more. The work was eventually sold.

Unlike the highly elaborate designs that stone carvers traditionally prepare before working on the stone, my charcoal drawings function more like a thought process than fixed blueprints. They are exploratory spaces where motifs emerge – threads, scissors, buttons (figs.6–7) and sewing machines – rather than detailed designs to be transposed onto stone. This way of working gives me freedom and allows for fluidity and intuitive discovery, which later informs the physical carving.

In two preliminary charcoal drawings made in 2023, made directly on stone surfaces as opposed to paper, the process involved repeatedly drawing, erasing and redrawing on the stone until the composition began to emerge. I have also explored the relationship between the sewing machine, a technology that has both liberated and constrained women, and the hands that operate it. The shape in my sketch is unrealistically long and forms a silhouette similar to an hourglass (fig.8). This design was originally developed as a study for a stone carving, which was never realised due to time constraints. I continue to consider carving a related form in my future work.

Rematriation as artistic practice

The concept of rematriation offers a framework for understanding my artistic process. The artist Outi Pieski notes that ‘rematriation starts where repatriation does not reach. It addresses the failure to bring history out of gendered perspectives and it acknowledges women’s history and value’.13 My work with stone and thread functions as rematriative practice; reclaiming my grandmother’s artistic legacy from obscurity and reasserting its value within contemporary fine art discourse.

My grandmother’s dresses were made to be worn out. I choose stone because it lasts. Yemen has stone architecture dating back thousands of years, it is a material embedded in the country’s ancient identity. By working with it I place women’s domestic knowledge within that same monumental tradition. Stone also does something fabric cannot: installed in a public space, it fixes a story in place, addressing whoever passes by and shaping how people understand their history and identity without asking permission. For Yemeni women whose knowledge was confined to private gatherings, interior spaces and garments worn and eventually discarded, stone offers the opposite: permanence, visibility and authority.

My grandmother and I are both artists. We worked in different mediums, at different times, facing different challenges. But the impulse was the same: to make something, to say something, to leave a mark that mattered to us, an act of remembering and re-remembering. This approach resonates with Pieski’s observation that ‘re-remembering processes is crucial for our cultures to survive and go on’.14 The political dimensions of preserving embodied matrilineal knowledge become apparent when we consider how displacement and conflict specifically target cultural continuity. As a Yemeni woman and refugee, these re-remembering processes take on additional urgency.

When I carve sewing tools into stone, I challenge both the gendered hierarchies that have diminished women’s creative contributions and the political forces that seek to destroy cultural continuity. Each artwork represents what could be called ‘emergency documentation’, preserving knowledge embedded primarily in memory and embodied practice before it disappears entirely.

Conclusion

My practice explores how matrilineal knowledge persists and transforms across generations, geographies and political contexts. The embodied archive my grandmother left – not in written texts but in gestures, techniques and approaches to material – provides the foundation for my art practice, which responds to contemporary concerns around cultural erasure, displacement and resistance.

This form of ancestral knowledge transmission offers alternatives to dominant historical models. It suggests that history lives not only in documents and monuments but in movements of hands across materials, in remembered patterns and in bodily knowledge passed from grandmother to granddaughter. In recognising and elevating these matrilineal lines of knowledge, we begin the work of rematriation; returning value and visibility to women’s contributions that have long sustained our cultures, even when those contributions were intended to wear out, disappear and be replaced rather than archived.

The distortion of memory through displacement adds another layer to this work of preservation. Each carved piece becomes both commemoration and recreation, an attempt to solidify fragmentary recollections before they fade entirely. By bringing these traditionally private, feminine forms of knowledge into public discourse around art, I create possibilities for more inclusive understandings of cultural history and artistic practice.

As artists, we are often asked whether we have made art since we were little and if there were artists in our families. I answer yes to both without thinking. When people ask ‘who?’, perhaps expecting to hear about a painter or sculptor in the family, I think of her – my grandmother, who worked with colour, composition and form on a daily basis, whose canvas was fabric and whose gallery was her family’s wardrobes. When I first learned sculpture before any formal training, my instinct was to carve her portrait, trying it in stone, clay and wax.

Later, I turned to her tools. The sewing machine, I learned, was invented and developed over decades by several men, until Isaac Singer created a machine for industrial production, with little consideration given to how it would transform women’s lives.15 He could not have predicted that these machines would become intimate creative companions; that women would master not only their operation but their mechanics, learning to oil, repair and replace its spare parts.

My grandmother asked the same question during every phone call: ‘When will you come back?’ These words echo now in the negative spaces of my carvings, in the silence between what was lost and what endures. I never had the chance to say goodbye, but I carry forward what she taught me, that creativity persists, that knowledge travels through hands and hearts, and that even in exile we continue to make, to remember, to resist.