10 Questions with Rana Huwais

Rana Huwais is a mixed-media artist specializing in printmaking and soft sculpture. She was born and still currently resides in southern Michigan, where she attends Albion College. There, she will receive a BFA with a concentration in printmaking, painting, and ceramics in the following spring. Her work focuses on explorations of cultural and personal memory, the peace and melancholy of nostalgia, and an embrace of naive optimism in form and life. Her current work explores intimacy and touch, specifically through one’s hands, large-scale soft sculptural installation, platonic love, and the endurance of cultural community and memory through the Arab concert style. She is most inspired by the romanticization of the mundane and any moments found in daily life that cause the heart to soften.

She recently received a FURSCA research grant to continue her work in installation this summer. She currently works as one of the Teaching Assistants in the Printmaking department at Albion College. She also works as a Curatorial Assistant/Collections Management Assistant in the Albion College Dickinson Gallery, where she has curated multiple exhibitions. These include the organization of a Medieval and Early Renaissance print show exploring anonymous art practice and the cult of the author and the co-organization of a Human Rights show currently on view in the Dickinson Gallery at Albion College.

ranahuwais.squarespace.com

ARTIST STATEMENT

In her work, Rana explores ideas of nostalgia, childhood, memory, and the complexity of being a second-generation immigrant from a nation currently undergoing the trauma of war. Formally, she engages with these themes with the use of bright colors, expressionistic and childlike mark-making, cultural motifs like the evil eye and Arabic script (often detailing personal diary-like passages), soft materials like fabrics and embroidery, and quaint "cute" imagery. In so doing, she evokes a sense of comfort, nurturing, and a return to childhood innocent intuitions. At the same time, she juxtaposes the visual brightness with the seriousness of the subject matter (i.e., an accelerated childhood, diaspora, tense familial relationships, cultural fables) to imply that her work sees the world's darkness through a child's eyes, one that we are taught to forget, and quickly grow out of. In exploring nostalgia as a fleeting and ultimately toxic concept, compounded by the history and trauma of her family and their home of Syria, she hopes to convey this sweetness with a tinge of melancholy and bitterness, but ultimately with a hope that we are able to embrace goodness and light as we need.

Her work speaks on the stage of vibrant, spiritual, cultural, and melancholically soft elements. At the same time, she engages in ideas of memory, home, space, and an upbringing influenced by a wider multicultural milieu. In her recent work, she has been exploring the different types of love found in life, from familial or maternal, with her soft sculpture book يا ماما (Ya Mama) to platonic (specifically feminine) love. Ideas of touch and intimacy, specifically how they relate to our wider well-being, are explored with her accumulating sculptures of hands, titled The Votive Means You're Cured. She is also interested in exploring the juxtapositions and implications of fabric and soft material in my works like The Father and The Mother, her upcoming FURSCA installation work, and multimedia projects like يا ماما. She also seeks to explore the power of the Arab tarab concert style experience, known for its hypnotic and impassioning effects on its listeners. More specifically, through this, she wishes to engage with the building of community and endurance of culture through the diaspora. How can a people look to traditions, created long before the hurting began, to heal?

INTERVIEW

First of all, introduce yourself to our readers. How did you start getting involved with art? And when did you realize you wanted to be an artist?

My name is Rana Huwais, and I'm a Syrian-American mixed media artist who's always been especially interested in kind things. I have always been creative, but I didn't often have the confidence to say so when I was younger. My creativity truly manifested in my writing ability, which I never doubted; there was a point where 'writer' was at the top of my very long imaginary list of dream jobs. This, of course, turned out to be very useful for my work now. My road to becoming a visual artist was one of the many unexpected results of Covid-19. The chaotic pandemic-era class signup protocol led me to enroll in one of the only open classes I was interested in, an introductory drawing class. Learning to draw was something I was deeply intimidated by but dreamed of doing. A few weeks in, our professor took us all to visit his studio, where he made it plain to us that being an artist wasn't some lofty, unattainable goal; artisthood was something challenging but infinitely rewarding and, most important to me, fun. I've been stuck since. 

You are a mixed media artist, working primarily with sculpture and printmaking. What are, in your opinion, the common traits between these two mediums? And what are the differences?

I think that sculpture and printmaking are the two mediums that allow for the most experimentation and therefore are the most fun. They are the ones, to my mind, that truly allow for all conceptual possibilities. Me making a collection of prints is obviously printmaking, but if I were to collect them in a pile, then they would become a book—a sculpture. There's something about books as the convergence of the two that I find really fascinating. To me, both sculpture and printmaking are incredibly tactile, intense, and detail-oriented. The artist has to be inches away from work at all times, and by doing so, they're able to breathe themselves into the piece; the same way that some people (me) talk to their plants to supposedly help them grow, I believe that the same conversations should be had with our works. On the other hand, the differences between the two really lie in the way that I use them. 

How does your practice change based on the medium you are using? Do you use different mediums to express different concepts or ideas? 

Lovingly, I find printmaking very neurotic. At the same time, I find sculpture quite menacing and imposing and painting as more free and expressive. Each medium to me has a different personality, and since I mix them all so often and freely, it often feels like I have a little toolbox where each of these little personalities resides and gets jumbled. But, I have come to notice that I go by tactile feeling as a means of imparting feeling or concept to my work. Sculpting with clay, as I mentioned, has an intimidating air about it because it's literally a hard and cold material. Clay also has an ancient feeling to it, only making them more imposing. This works well if I want to create a formidable air to a piece. However, sculpting and printmaking can be soft if I use fabrics, or even thin paper, or found objects that make it seem whimsical. So the same medium is able to be transported just by the feeling of what I'm using. I have never found printmaking to not be tense, though. It's the consistent eldest child. I really love setting types for poems that are intense since it only makes it more high-strung. From there, because nothing can stay intense with me for too long, I like to diffuse it by adding whimsical doodles or bright colors. I bounce from medium to medium as steps in a process—we start with the intensity of print, diffuse it with soft sculpture and the freedom of expressionistic painting, sew some buttons on it, add some doodles of stars, and call it a day when it looks like you could cuddle with it. Really, I'm hiding the big scary stuff under layers and layers of lovely soft stuff that you have to dig through. Isn't that what it's like to get to know a person? 

You are of Arabic descent, and your culture is well-represented in your work. What are the main traits you apply to your work? And how does it influence your practice? 

Living in an area where my family was the only Arab family, something began to happen, and my family sort of became my culture. My family's cultural singularity bolstered our closeness; we four were the unit. Being far from the communities of the homeland, per se, led me to transfer my cultural idea onto that unit that gave that culture to me: the gateway to my lineage. When I think of my culture, I think of my parents and the lives they led, their family before them, and my brother's and my place in it as the viewers also tasked with carrying it all forward. So really, any work I make about my family, whether that be our relationships, the things they have taught me, or the stories they tell me, is inherently cultural.
Formally in my work, I occasionally use motifs like the evil eye and jasmine plants as some of the many small easter eggs I leave behind. This is a tactic I use very often, where the symbols I use have loaded meaning to me but are often very simple, and I leave the viewer to decipher it. The most common method I do is by writing in Arabic, almost as a code. In my entire school career, including undergrad now, I hadn't met another student who could read it, and it felt like a way I could be vulnerable by my own means. Only I could tell them what it meant in my own time. It's very much a product of my environment, almost self-centered; I had begun to think of myself as alone on an island with an indecipherable language, blabbering to myself. But really, there are countless others who can understand it. I sometimes laugh because the Arabic I do write is often very broken, and sometimes I struggle to read back what I've written. I out-code myself. I think it's the sentiment and practice of writing something that matters to me. It feels all the more personal to do it in the language of my grandmother and of the dubbed Turkish television shows she loves so much. 
I like to play around with the idea of Arabic as a mystical poetic language, where each script is a spell and evokes the might of the heavens. On the surface level, based on orientalist ideas of the West, my writings would seem that way. But in reality, I've written about how little sleep I got last night, how I hate the color I painted my nails, how quickly I descend into overthinking and want to trade my brain out for a new one, how much I love peaches and how my dad prefers Aleppo style zaatar because he's patriotic, so patriotic he eats it with a spoon (a practice he passed onto me)—all with what I believe is the handwriting of a child. 
These ideas of mysticism and harrowing dramatic tales of intergenerational suffering, all the things the West has come to expect of an Arab child of immigrants, I despise. I live in the constant weariness of being tokenized or pigeonholed into this type of work. I'm so weary of this, in fact, that I often use my heritage as a background element to inform my concepts, keeping it out of the spotlight so it won't get snatched. It's in those small easter eggs; it's in the stories that lead to pieces; it's in my titles. I want my work to be about me, a person with a heritage, and not me as the representative of a heritage. I'd be a terrible representative anyway; I don't even like cardamom. 

What other themes do you pursue with your work? 

First and foremost, I'm forever fascinated by nostalgia and longing. The sentimentality towards the passage of time that I take to my work has always existed in me, but I think that there's something very haunting about the idea that humans will always mourn for something as inevitable as the past. I also love the fact that nostalgia exists alongside memories, sometimes one clouding or inventing the other. There's a sinister quality to this that I also love to explore. But above all, I love the tenderness of our memories and how endearing it is that people will always long for times when they are happy. But how do we do this without becoming stuck in that past? We all exist in our own little bubbles of our experiences, which in turn become our worlds.
I also love exploring affection in all its forms and the tenderness it brings. The ways that affection differs between friends, family members, or partners are also fascinating. I especially explore familial affection since that is the form that I think truly sees the realities of our personhood; they're there from the beginning all the way to the end—especially mine. I also am beginning to realize a common philosophical thread of a sort of optimistic existentialism, the kind that realizes the meaninglessness of the universe but uses that as a means of endless possibility over doom. This leaves it all open for us to decide, which is so exciting. I like the thematic combination of this idea with the appreciation for the romanticization of the mundane, something that we are beginning to see appreciated more often in the media, especially since the pandemic. Endless possibility meets your favorite cup of tea: worlds are made. 

You have a very recognizable style, mixing childish images and crafting techniques. How did you come up with this style?

It happened organically as I came up with my concepts. I'm very concept-first since this helps me lay the groundwork for the ideas I want to communicate; to me, this is the most important part. The formal elements really serve as the support to the final structure. My style really began with my Baby Talk triptych. It was the perfect combination of the more intense subject matter buoyed by the bright illustrations and Arabic text. It's the trifecta that I've used as a basis for almost all my pieces since. I'm very happy that my work has a jovial visual quality to it since I'm always looking for my work to be a comforting force. The more serious bits end up being little treats for me to hoard alone and give out crumbs if I so choose to explain the pieces. 

In your work, you often deal with the idea of memory and nostalgia. How much of your personal experience can we read in your work?

Oh, one thousand percent. It wouldn't be mine if it wasn't my experience at the core. As I mentioned, I define myself as an intensely sentimental person, and I think it would be impossible for me not to make art about that. 

You are still very young but already active both as an artist and a curator for Albion College Dickinson Gallery. What do you think of the art community and market? 

As the cliche goes, I think the world would be a very boring place without artists. We are such an empathetic, funny, invigorating, infuriating bunch of people, and I'm proud I am one. The art market, on the other hand, terrifies me. Especially while still in school, artists exist in a bubble of inspiration and development and activity and interest, only to leave and be left to deal with the reality of a stifling capitalist grip on our market. There seems to be a huge dissonance between what an artist's price should be and a price that is affordable and accessible to a wider market. The former differs greatly from the latter based on work time, material, and expertise, which are essential to any position's calculation of a fair wage. Making a liveable wage while charging high but fair-to-me prices seem incredibly difficult. So what does one do? To charge a lower price means to not profit and 'cheat' yourself; to charge a high price means to know your worth but not sell. For me now, at the beginning of my career, it seems like a trap. Fair pricing, but for who? Selling work in a gallery means doing work that is monetarily inaccessible to all by the design of the setting. That is, if you can get that representation in the first place by meeting the right person at the right second through your impeccable networking ability, which is also your family connection, but you'd never admit that. Or if you have the money and time to do endless application after application. The cutthroat world of gallery representation leaves many artists with the thought of selling independently, making themselves a small business brand—exhausting. Our current social media landscape dictates that to have a successful brand is to exist every second for the viewer, every moment monetizable—suffocating and unrealistic. But regardless of all this, there is a part of me that is too in love with those in the bubble, those who have the inspiration and the humor to be optimistic about it all. I hope I can be like them for as long as I can, and I'm stubborn, so it'll be a while. 

As a young artist, at the beginning of your practice, what would you like to see more of in the art world? 

I would love for there to be a government subsidization of the arts, at least in America. I think the return of a WPA-style artistic prioritization is long overdue. You get good art if you take care of your artists. I would also envision more accessibility to artistic connections. I would love for creating a community to be easy. I wish we relied less on networking, but that's just because I'm so bad at it. I wish AI art wasn't so readily available, we don't understand enough about it yet, and that scares me. I wish that all artists participated in wage transparency; it'll only make us more knowledgeable of our worth and assertive enough to reach it. I wish that the repatriation of artifacts was an utmost priority. I wish the decorative and the craft and the hobbyist were taken more seriously. I wish that critiques would happen well past school; we all need them. I wish there were huge book clubs to discuss theory since I am a nerd who loves reading theory. Lastly, I wish that more joyous and bright art will be put into the world, and I hope we have fun doing the work we do. May we all be paid justly and sleep well at night. Amen. 

And lastly, what are your projects for the future? What are you working on and hoping to accomplish this year?

As follows are my chaotic plans. Currently, I am working on my grant work for the Foundation for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity at Albion College. It's a huge honor, and I'm having an incredible time. My piece consists of soft sculpture and carpet tufting, for which I have gone frighteningly over budget. Following that begins my grind for my final year in undergrad. I have to finish some sculptures from last year by knitting them some sweaters, sculpting more hands for my army, hopefully, taking part in another ceramics sale, and recording the sound for a video piece using stitched ceramic plates I made a few weeks ago. All the while, I'm going to keep writing in the hopes that some of it will be used for pieces. But most daunting is my thesis piece, which will be a risograph comic collection of short stories exploring the intersection of existentialism and the romanticization of the mundane. I'm thrilled I get to make another comic since it's a medium that perfectly embodies both comedy and sentiment, and the former is something that I find myself arriving at often but don't imbue into many of my pieces. I'll also hopefully get to use connections I made at my workshop last summer at Penland School of Craft to complete it. It all feels so full circle. This ambitious list also will only take me to the end of next spring. Beyond that, it's a mystery. The options are open, and the world is vast, but that's how I like it. 

Artist’s Talk

Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.