My degree show is made up of fragmented windows offering insights into both our interior lives where I bend and disrupt thresholds of domesticity and psychological spaces that reveal themselves in dreams, memory and historical narrative. This point of hybridity where you are unable to discern if a place is real or imagined or whether figures are from the past or present is the theme for many of my pieces.

Throughout the series windows, birds and theatrical domestic places become their own motifs for revealing and concealing, this simultaneously positions the viewer as both an observer and participator. Influenced by mythology, natural landscapes such as bogs and the exclusion of female figures from historical canon, I warp and construct these new lenses as an attempt to destabilise fixed ideas of identity and reality. The energy and relationship between crowds, landscapes and anima became a particular interest to my practice this year, this was explored through readings of Metamorphosis.

Safia’s practice explores the transformative properties of materials activated by light in space.

Using industrial and organic materials — including aluminium chain, perspex, and dyed textiles — she investigates tensions between materiality and fabrication, whether shaped by hand or machine. Hardness and softness, opacity and translucency, structure and fragility remain central to the work.

Photography plays an important role within her process, particularly images of reflections, windows, curtains, gates, and transitional architectural surfaces. Screens, partitions, and suspended forms echo these visual cues, recurring as semi-permeable architectures that choreograph movement and perception within space.

These observations are translated through layering, repetition, and surface manipulation, in which industrial materials are softened by fabric and gesture. Repetition functions as both ritual and labour, with cutting, sanding, drilling, sewing, and construction becoming integral to the work’s development.

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