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 everyday materials activated by light within space.

She works with industrial and organic materials such as aluminium chain, perspex, and dyed and sewn textiles to investigate the tension between materiality and hand- and machine-fabrication processes. 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 sculptural approach. Screens, partitions, and suspended forms echo these visual cues, recurring as semi-permeable architectures that choreograph movement and perception within space. She further explores these impressions through layering, repetition, and surface manipulation, softening industrial materials with fabric and gesture. Repetition becomes both ritual and labour as cutting, sanding, drilling, sewing, and construction are woven into the genesis of form.

Inspired 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.