Safia Hamidat

Safia’s practice explores the transformative properties of everyday materials activated by light and sound within space.

She works with both industrial and organic materials—such as aluminium chain, perspex, and dyed and sewn textiles—to investigate the tension between materiality and processes of fabrication, whether by hand or machine. Contrasts like hardness and softness, opacity and translucency, and structure and fragility are central to her work.

Photographic moments of reflections, windows, gates, and liminal architectural surfaces inspire her creative process and inform her sculptural approach. Screens, partitions, and suspended forms echo these visual cues, recurring as semi-permeable architectures choreographing movement and perception within space. These impressions are further explored through layering, repetition, and surface manipulation, in which industrial materials are softened by fabric and gesture. Here, repetition becomes both ritual and labour, as acts of cutting, sanding, drilling, sewing, and construction are woven into the genesis of form.

Influenced by Giuliana Bruno’s writing on screen materiality, Safia approaches installation as an expanded form of painting and drawing in space. More recently, she has incorporated sound, extending her work into multisensory environments that explore atmosphere, immersion, and the interconnectedness of body, architecture, and perception.