20. Aya Haidar
“Making, building and creating things has always been the way in which I understand the world”
Textile artist Aya Haidar is something of a local celebrity in Hackney. If you’re a mother of young children you will have run into her at one of the numerous local mother and baby groups (as a mother of four she has been a prolific attendee). She’s the sort of woman who makes a lasting impression – warm, passionate, and brimming with energy. Her work is deeply personal, political, sometimes provocative and often extremely moving.
Aya is Lebanese. Her parents were forced to flee Lebanon in 1982, due to civil war. They initially went to Jordan where they married, before eventually settling in Saudi Arabia. Aya’s mother then fell pregnant with her: “she needed to find somewhere to give birth to me where I could get a passport that would give me a chance in life. She had a cousin in America and so flew to the States and gave birth to me in Texas. I got a passport and then came back to Saudi Arabia a few weeks later. Four years later, she did the same with my sister in Canada – my mum has a brother there. So she's just collecting passports!”. When Aya was six her father, an agricultural engineer, changed jobs. His work brought him to the UK and the family moved straight to London.
Growing up, Aya’s grandmother played a formative role in her upbringing. “Every single day after school, I would go and see her. Every weekend, I would be with her. She played a big part in raising me. She was always my favourite - such an important person in my life. She died when she was 98”. Aya tells me about the resourcefulness of her grandmother and other Lebanese women of her generation: “if you've got a hole in your sock, you darn it. You don't throw it out and buy something new. She never ever threw anything away. She had drawers full of scraps. We would sit and chat but we'd always be making, our hands were busy. That's the way history, skills, stories always got passed down – women sat collectively in their homes and made and stitched. And as they spoke and shared stories, their children would play at their feet and then took on those stories”.
As she got older, Aya knew she had to study art. Fortunately, her parents were supportive “my parents always said, ‘do what you want to do, do whatever you're passionate about, that's the most important thing’. And I'm very grateful for that, because that’s not what my other Arab friends were hearing from their parents”. She did a foundation course at Chelsea College of Art, then went on to do her BA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art. In her third year she took part in an exchange programme with the Art Institute of Chicago. While in the fibre materials department, something clicked. It occurred to her that textiles could be political, not just about mending, making and darning.
I asked Aya what creativity means to her: “it's something that has always been part of me, a way of processing the world or understanding things, through a visual language. It has always been the way in which I communicate - I've never been good at anything that's not tangible. I need to be able to touch and see and understand something right in front of me. In maths or science, I was completely lost. I never understood. Making, building and creating things has always been the way in which I understand the world”.
After her final, hugely personal project at the Slade received mixed reviews, Aya began to question whether she wanted to enter the cutthroat world of art after all. A fellow student urged her to consider pursuing politics instead, so she put in an application for the master’s degree in NGOs and Development at LSE, and got one of the highly sought-after places: “I was very honest, I said I have no knowledge of humanitarianism whatsoever, but I'm an artist - I look at the world differently, I am critical and I'm passionate and that's all I can offer. Later my tutor told me that was her favourite application”.
After Aya’s degree show, a gallery representative (from Bischoff Weiss) got in touch and told her they loved her work: “they said, ‘it's so powerful. It's so meaningful. It's so evocative. We want to represent you’. Honestly, that was my lifeline. I remember messaging them about my politics masters and they said they’d wait for me. When I finished my MSc, they gave me a solo show and represented me for seven years”.
Even though Aya didn’t grow up in Lebanon, it has always been her homeland and a constant in her life. She visits as often as she can. So much of her work is about identity and trying to piece together where she and her family came from and why her parents left – “[it’s] about trying to understand what my mum went through – why she left and how, as well as how it made her feel”.
“All the food I cook is Lebanese. My temperament is Lebanese. But there's still this sense that I'm not fully Lebanese when I'm there, because I haven't endured what they have. I haven't woken up terrified for my life or been bombed, or lived without electricity or water. I am married to a Londoner and we have kids that we're raising here, but I always get the question, ‘Oh, but where are you really from?’ Which I don't mind because I'm not native to here, but you're never fully accepted as British. I often found that troubling, but actually I get to have two [identities] and I'm really interested in exploring both. So while Lebanon definitely shapes me, I’m trying to piece together what it means to come from somewhere, but not fully”.
As well as her own history and experiences, the seeds of inspiration for her work often come from interactions with others, many who have experienced adversity. One example was a project she was involved with in 2017, when Aya was invited to do a residency in Scotland. Her oldest two children were both under two. An arts organisation called Deveron Projects had funding from the European Social Fund to integrate 120 Syrian refugees into a small town in rural Aberdeenshire.
“The local authority couldn't figure out how to integrate this group of refugees into this tiny, tiny town. Deveron Projects reached out and asked if I would move up to Scotland for four months. I had to leave [my husband] because he was working. I was like, okay, I'll make it happen. I literally packed one bag and I took the kids. I don't remember if I got there by plane or train, but I just moved up there”.
Once there, Aya was partnered with Marc Higgin, an anthropologist. In October 2017 there had been an oil crash in Scotland which led to high levels of unemployment and substance abuse. “It got dark at 2pm. There was one post office, one corner shop, one library and a church and everything closed at 2pm. There was so much snow! I'm aware of the world but it was such a culture shock for me”.
Aya continues “the local Scots and the Syrians are on the same level, socially. There is unemployment, there's poverty, they're all on benefits, they’re all living in the same housing estates and their kids go to the same schools. But there's something that's not getting them together. We looked at the stats and saw that the Scots had bad health, high levels of diabetes, coronary heart disease, etc. But the Syrians were very healthy. The difference was in the food. The Scots ate a lot of processed and fast food, but the Syrians cooked everything from scratch, even with very little money. I was the only Arab speaker they had come into contact with since arriving”.
With that information, they decided the project would centre around food. They used the funding to open a café and hired two Syrians to run it. Visitors to the café would pay whatever they could afford. They cooked Syrian food and baked British cakes, alongside tea, coffee and Turkish coffee. Everyone had to sit together around one big table and slowly, conversations started without necessarily being in the same language.
“The people who came to the cafe were on the periphery of society. Single mothers, people with mental health issues or the lonely or elderly. The unemployed. All these people that had no place in society, but they found a place in this cafe. And even though I am married, while I was there I was like a single mum with my two young kids, but I had nowhere to put them. It was really important that they and other visiting kids had something to do, so the first thing I did was paint one of the walls with blackboard paint”.
While Aya was working in the café, she overheard or engaged in so many conversations and stories, that then became the inspiration for an entire body of work - her “Soleless” series (see images below), where she embroidered their experiences on the worn soles of shoes.
“Their stories are harrowing. Some of them are horrific but it’s important to humanise those stories in order to remember them. I was nursing my youngest, sitting at a table in the cafe and one of the women was looking at me and she said to me in Arabic ‘you hold your baby close, hold it tight’.
I asked her where are your children? She told me she came on one of the dinghies. In the Mediterranean her baby was screaming, cold and hungry. There were patrol boats around and it was dangerous. Not just because of the boat, but if they get caught, they get sent back. The trafficker kept shouting at her, telling her to shut her baby up, because the patrol boats would arrest everyone. But she couldn’t, so he pulled the baby from her arms and threw the baby overboard. There are many, many stories like this, so all of my work is loaded with these interactions. It needs to be told”.
Given her four children and the demands of her work, I asked Aya if she has any rituals to get her through her day. “I am so strict and regimented in every aspect of my life. But I also have to fill every waking second with something! During the day I am fully dedicated to the kids. School drop off, pick up. I’m chair of the Parent Teacher Association and parent governor, so I have numerous duties to fulfil there. Then cooking, cleaning, the food shop, you name it. After school it's swimming, all the activities. But when they go to bed at 7pm, that's when I start work. If I don’t, I never get anything done. But the wonderful thing about the creative industry is it can be so flexible. I can be there for my kids. They're long days, but I'm doing two things that I love and they exist together and also feed each other. It's symbiotic”.
We then inevitably talked at length about motherhood and the endless juggle. Aya has a lot to say about the subject and when I first got to know her, was in the midst of working on her “Highly Strung” piece (see images above), which was acquired by the Guggenheim in its entirety. A staggering achievement of which she is understandably proud: “when it was installed, the conversations that came out of that piece - the women that came in and exclaimed, Yes! I feel seen! The volume of work that we do that is invisible, that is taken for granted, gets completely brushed off”.
I asked Aya if she has any tips for mothers who might be contemplating returning to work or starting something new. She feels some regret that she was working so hard when her two eldest were born and she didn’t take any maternity leave “I was full-time at a charity and I was working on my art practice and I was a mum. It was intense. My firstborn’s cot was an open drawer in the office where I was working, with a cushion! Mentally, emotionally, I regret it, because it robbed me of that precious time with my babies. I was completely overwhelmed with work. You're never going to have that time back, so don’t rush into anything!”.
Aya says living in Hackney has a huge influence over her life and work. “I feel rooted here because I've been here for over 20 years. My partner was born and raised in Dalston. I feel I can offer my kids everything and anything they want being here - anything is possible in London, which is such a gift. What I love about Clapton specifically, is the community. To be able to step out of my door and say hi to 20 people and know that if I need something, there are neighbours on my street that have my house key and I've got theirs…”.
I asked Aya what is it about her work that gives her the greatest pleasure and she answers, simply: “people, stories, making”.
The stories! Does she write them down? How can she possibly store them all in her brain? “I do. I write names, I document them, I write every detail down and I collect objects. Things that they get rid of that they don't want, I collect and I keep. I don't know what I'm going to use these things for, but their time will come, you know?”.
It feels frivolous in light of our earlier conversation, but Aya is so stylish, in such a distinctive way, that I’m interested to know how much of an influence her work has on the way she presents herself. She says “in terms of my home and me, literally everything has sentimental value, everything has a story. Every object, I know exactly where I got it, who gave it to me. Everything I own, I have to absolutely adore and has to have a story - just like my work”.
We talk about the women in her life that Aya feels most inspired by. First, the Palestinian artist, Mona Hatoum, who grew up in Lebanon: “she is the reason I wanted to become an artist, my favourite artist of all time. I was recently in an exhibition alongside her at Kettle’s Yard and The Whitworth, so I met her and we hit it off. I felt like my whole life made sense when we had a conversation. Conceptually and creatively she is so sharp, so clever. Proper fangirl status!”
Singer and actor, Paloma Faith: “she’s one of my closest friends, we hang out a lot. Our friendship was cemented because our children are in the same year at school. We’re very similar in our approach to life and parenting. I find her inspiring because she will have had an arena gig the night before, somewhere like Wembley, but she’ll be back on the school run the following morning. She’s very real and very grounded”.
And finally, Mylene Sylvestre, who is publishing director of The Guardian, mother of three and Aya’s next-door neighbour: “she’s very driven in her career, but she’s also a brilliant mum. Our kids see one another all the time, they’re like an extension of our family. When I think of all the reasons I would never leave Clapton, she’s at the top of my list. She balances motherhood, an incredibly difficult job in journalism, is a woman of colour and is at the top of her game. She’s slaying it”.
Finally, I asked Aya if she has a dream project she wants to work on: “obviously the Turner Prize, Venice Biennale. The fourth plinth! I mean - you have to dream big”.
If anyone can do it, it’s Aya.
To see more of Aya’s incredible work, visit her website, or find her on Instagram.
