What does it mean—physically, spiritually, spatially—to submerge into the subconscious? Mortality is prodded at, played with, and penultimately embedded in the dreamscapes of Wafa Al Falahi, releasing her intuitive imagination of both the natural and the unknown.
Her most recently exhibited series, Fever Dream plays with color, texture, and form to materialize the in-betweenness of her psyche and the physical world. Figures collapse into one another, with proximity and temporality rendering some beings visible and others obscure; in a blend of papier-mâché, pastels, colored pencils, and acrylic paint, among others.
Wafa’s creative approach—often chaotic, intuitive, and courageously experimental—pours her physical and interior selves into the image and mark-making process. Broad and delicate gestures of charcoal, layered with colored pencil, coax animalistic creatures into being; their silhouettes mounted into canvas from the weight and tactility of papier-mâché. Her work becomes a site of articulation between dreamscapes and matter: the imagined and the tactile merge, giving shape to a visual language that questions how dreams reflect and refract life itself.
In the triptych Fever Dream I, a symbolic bird sits in primary focus, occupying the temporal space between the human and inhuman, the real and the mystical, the factual and the unknown. Here, viewers are introduced to Wafa’s subconscious dialogue between mortality and memory, where time behaves as an integral, unspoken medium in her practice. The side panels evoke daylight, where nature is more closely tethered to reality, while the central frame slips into night, a denser, more irregular imagining of the bird-like creature. This nocturnal canvas behaves like a lens: capturing what resists visibility, like an animal photographed in darkness. The figures emerge in and from multiple directions, caught in a flowing dance of instinct and recollection that moves at their own accord. Wafa employs an empathetic perspective, moving with tenderness towards the seen and unseen, the real and the imagined, the decayed and the emerging.
In the early stages of making and experimenting, Wafa became entranced with observing the impact of time on materiality—studying and sketching and casting pears as they molded over several, questioning decay’s meaning across the physical and textile. When intertwined, she discovered, these dimensions of decay become a spiritual process through which to portray death and afterlife. This discovery was realized through a personal, coincidental interaction with a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest, but didn’t survive despite Wafa’s attempts to care for it. In grieving what could not be preserved, Wafa was confronted with the fragility and inevitability of loss; and, in doing so, embraced a new—albeit overwhelming—portal into the spiritual.
In Fever Dream II, which preceded Fever Dream I in creation, Wafa’s use of unstretched raw canvas allows the mixed mediums to spill not only into one another but into a seemingly infinite mode of existing; bleeding into and beyond themselves. The Fever Dream I triptych then builds onto this, unfolding as a timeline of transformation: two temporal states in flux, with the central panel behaving as a porous threshold. Her compositions function as windows, brief moments in time that open into a mystical world, the canvas existing in duality as both a boundary and a passage. And as her experimentation with scale currently evolves, these openings shift from bridges, into doors, and eventually into entire worlds of their own. Through this gradual expansion, Wafa tightens the distance between our physical world and the imagined realms that dwell within her canvases, calling on viewers to dwell in and inhabit her work through intuitive and emotional registers that transcend the physical.
With a BA in Spatial Design, Wafa seems to approach her work as a metaphysical space. She interrogates how the two-dimensional can be reimagined into sculptural form—manipulating perception and scale to construct visual landscapes that require both distance and closeness, time and patience, to be fully seen and engaged with. Her making process is rooted in an oscillation of addition and reduction, building and unbuilding, curating an amalgamation of sketches, textures, and marks that become beings, landscapes, and sensations. Each layer is considered with care toward material, the interior self, and the elusive boundary between the existing and the ephemeral.
At a closer, more observatory glance, viewers are taken by surprise at these landscapes of the imaginary, the mythological beliefs that roam free. Wafa’s material experimentation intersects at the relationality between softness and roughness, making with a tenderness that thus refuses to shy away the unfamiliar, but rather, invites it in. There exists, or rather insists, a gentility amid the chaos, an intimacy between the layers. The blur between the art and the artist, her internal world and external being, is perceptible here by virtue of my knowing of Wafa herself, who similarly can be reserved from afar, but open and inviting in her multidimensionality over time. The constant state of dialogue between her conscious and subconscious, grasping at memory, interrogating the world beyond its liminality, emerges from both herself and her canvases in a mode that is both raw and genuine.
The fragility of remembrance, of dwelling and becoming, and of accepting mortality converge in the translation from canvas to sculpture. Her ceramics Bird in Flight and Bullbird expand on this narrative of metamorphosis as the figures of her painted dreamscapes take corporeal shape. Bird in Flight, a deep blue form with a vivid orange beak, seems caught mid-motion, its elongated body bending toward the ground as if weighed by time yet yearning for ascent. Bullbird, in contrast, fuses animality and fantasy: speckled yellow with a protruding horn, simultaneously decaying and regenerating. Both sculptures translate the textures and temporalities of Fever Dream I and Fever Dream II into tangibility, where matter itself becomes a vessel of transformation.
Wafa’s sculptures, in essence, materialize her inner world interacting with the external in an overwhelming physicality—emerging as a preservation of the animals and creatures she engages with in two-dimension. Memory becomes a thread within the Fever Dream series: what becomes, what remains, and what is remembered? When viewing Wafa’s work from a bird's eye view, these recurring motifs reveal themselves as echoes of her subconscious—drawn out, released, and returning in perpetual motion.
In Fever Dream, decay is inverted: a process of loss but also one of becoming in the nature of life’s cyclical continuation. Created through intuitive gestures and a deep-seated empathy, Wafa constructs thresholds into the unseen, where form and formlessness, body and dream, life and death, coexist in a constant, expansive state of renewal.
