Emirati artist Sumayyah Al Suwaidi on designing Emirates Woman’s digital cover

Life

There is more than one woman on the digital cover of the April issue of Emirates Woman. Look carefully to find their profiles hidden within an array of flowers of different Arab nations from the region. Sumayyah Al Suwaidi put them there deliberately, layered into the composition with the patience and precision that defines two decades of practice in digital art. When her husband asked to look at the cover, he couldn’t see them. She was not surprised. “We immediately see it,” she says of the difference in how women observe – taking a beat, then adding: “We see the details immediately.” It’s an anecdote, but in its own little way, it makes the entire argument of The Female Gaze as the theme of this issue: that women look differently, read differently, find things that others pass over entirely. Al Suwaidi is, depending on the moment you catch her, an artist, a curator, a fashion designer, and an entrepreneur. She is also a wife, a mother to five children and holds a full-time job alongside all of it. She was raised in Abu Dhabi in what she describes as a conservative Emirati household, shaped by a family that valued togetherness and principle. Her aunt, she notes with unmistakable pride, was the first Emirati woman to receive a scholarship to study in England in the 1970s, and the first Emirati female to work in an oil and gas company. The women in her family, it seems, have always found their own way to be first. Al Suwaidi’s own particular firstness was born when she was sixteen years old and sitting beside her cousin watching her work on a college assignment in an art software programme she had never seen before.

The encounter was immediate and total. “I asked her what is this, what is this magic?” she recalls. She went home that same weekend and asked her aunt for a computer. Not to study, not to work – to make art. Her aunt, practical and resourceful, did not simply buy one; she had a machine built to specification, with design software installed from the start. “If it wasn’t for the computers, I wouldn’t have been an artist,” Al Suwaidi says plainly. “That’s how I am an artist.” By 2001, she had released her first collection, inspired by the late Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan. By 2003, she had her first exhibition in Abu Dhabi. The years that followed took her work to galleries across the UAE, and then further: the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Germany, China, Morocco. At the JF Kennedy Center in Washington DC, she exhibited a piece that stopped a woman in her tracks – a figure holding a flower on one side and a knife on the other, a study in the same person changed by circumstance. The woman began to cry. She said it reminded her of her sister.

Al Suwaidi had made it about herself at a time of transformation; the woman in Washington found something entirely her own inside it. “If your art doesn’t reach the hearts of the people or doesn’t help make them feel something,” Al Suwaidi says, “then it’s not art. Then it’s just a decor piece or just a craft. Art has to have some kind of passion in it, some kind of story in it. It has to give you that bite of electricity.” Her work has been offered at Christie’s and exhibited at Sotheby’s – endorsements she wears with quiet satisfaction. Al Suwaidi is not one for false modesty, but neither for hollow boasting. What she has earned, she has earned the hard way: going door to door to galleries in her early years, carrying her work, asking to be seen.

“You have to be persistent,” she says. “You have to be stubborn. You have to know that what you’re doing is the right thing and you’re doing it for yourself.” To artists who complain that opportunities don’t exist, she is bracingly direct. “It’s not true. It depends on your own hard work. It depends on how hungry you are and what you want to accomplish.”Her approach to the work itself is grounded in something deeply personal. “My work is my daily diary,” she says. “It’s where I exhale everything I inhale during my day.” Juggling the full complexity of a life lived at full speed – the art, the fashion brand Seen, the curation, the job, the family – requires somewhere to put it all. “If I wasn’t an artist, I might be a boxer,” she says with a laugh. “I’d find a punching bag in my room and I’d be punching it every day.” The art absorbs what the day generates. The strongest work, she has learned, tends to come precisely from those moments of intensity. “Usually the best work I do is the work that I do when I am” – she pauses to find the right word – “intense. Or when I am worried. Or when I am feeling down. So yeah, that’s when the best work comes out.” The cover she created for Emirates Woman is no exception. She worked on it during the current period of regional anxiety, and she poured the fullness of that pressure into the piece. Her recurring visual signatures are all there: women, always women, often with exaggerated features – very large eyes, very long necks – that make them striking rather than straightforwardly beautiful, and that carry in their unconventionality a kind of defiance. Recently, she has added stars and moons to her vocabulary, elements she describes as giving her work a feeling of hope. “That feeling that keeps us going,” she says. “That is what changes everything in our day-to-day life.”

And hidden within the cover: the multiple faces. There, and not there, for those who look closely enough. It is a thoroughly female gesture – to put something in plain sight and trust that the right eyes will find it. “The difference between the woman’s gaze and the man’s gaze,” Al Suwaidi says, is precisely this: “a woman’s gaze is a very calculated one. We tend to translate and decipher every little thing that we’re looking at. And then we say why, how, when, who, what – so many questions. So our gaze is always different.” Sumayyah Al Suwaidi has been asking those questions, through pixels and images, for nearly thirty years. She intends to keep going. “I always take the opportunity,” she says of the invitations that come her way to show her work, to represent her country, to speak for something larger than herself. “I like to represent my country and I’m proud of my country and what we have accomplished so far.” She pauses. “I like to share it with the world.” The artistry of the UAE as expressed through the eyes of Al Suwaidi is an utterly unique perspective. That of a woman fully formed, standing in her power and owning her vision.

– For more on luxury lifestyle, news, fashion and beauty follow Emirates Woman on Facebook and Instagram

Images: Supplied