The artist’s long-haired figure, and her hand- and footprints, appear repeatedly on the canvas that serves as the support of her work. The charcoal patches manifest her body and her movements during the act of drawing, like a studio self-portrait. For Saleh Mahameed, life and art are well and truly in thrall to each other: she produces her work on the floor of her parents’ living room, amidst the throng of her cherished dogs and cats, who leave their own mark on the painting with their pawprints.
Black charcoal is dominant in Saleh Mahameed’s work, lending itself to everything from architectural drawings, to sketching and scribbling, and provides for an intimate, sensitive, and tender mode of expression, thanks largely to the direct contact of the fingers with the drawing surface, as they smear, rub, and smooth the line. For her, the use of charcoal a way of leaving a mark in a direct, visceral manner, using the locale’s own materials. Charcoal is directly linked to her birthplace, Umm el-Fahem (“Mother of Charcoal”), which, as its name suggests, has long been famous as a place of charcoal production and trade.
In her works, Saleh Mahameed anthropomorphizes objects, such as in the cab of the big truck that crashed into her car, or a backhoe. These are shown next to the broken traffic demarcation fence, as though bowing their heads and asking for forgiveness from the dejected, bruised figure of the artist, as she is led away from the scene of the accident, supported by two male figures. The image is redolent of iconic representations in the New Testament of Jesus being taken down from the Cross, except that in this case it is Mary (Maria) who bears, with her own body, the pain and helplessness of the victim. That image is heightened by the presence of the calves’ legs, which are visible at the bottom of the cloth, dripping with red blood, resonating with the biblical scene of the Binding of Isaac as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion. Beside all these, security and surveillance cameras function as a kind of mechanical eye, spying, monitoring, and documenting, blithely indifferent to the drama taking place before them, devoid of compassion and blind to injustice and human pain.
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