Azza Al Qubaisi

Rising up from the sands of Giza is a tall and majestic pyramid, but this particular structure has nothing of the antiquity of its celebrated peers. Treasure (2023), by the Emirati artist Azza Al Qubaisi, was recently part of Forever Is Now, an Egyptian exhibition of Middle Eastern contemporary sculpture that has taken place annually since 2021. The work, made of a richly rusty steel, has a golden crown that glistens in the sunlight, and is surrounded by the soft, undulating forms of Dunes 1.1, another large-scale installation from 2022. Looking at this monumental work, it comes as a surprise to learn that Al Qubaisi originally trained as a jewellery artist, working on an intricate scale. Yet there are more links connecting Treasure to the artist’s past than might first meet the eye. Viewers were encouraged to interact with the work, walking through the dunes to enter the hollow centre of Treasure and enjoy the same kind of tactile experience that one naturally has with jewellery. “I was always very clear with myself that my medium must be something you can touch,” says Al Qubaisi. “My sculptures just grew in size. We wear jewellery, but now it’s the other way around and the sculpture wears us.”

Born in Abu Dhabi in 1978, Al Qubaisi showed an interest in arts and crafts from a young age. “My mother would take me to different hardware shops to buy paint and nails,” she recalls. “That made me happier than the dolls and toys that most children of my age wanted.” Her parents were keen art lovers, filling their home with glass and ceramic sculptures and visiting museums while on trips abroad. By her final years of high school, Al Qubaisi knew that she wanted to create artworks in three dimensions, but did not enjoy working at a large scale. “I wanted to create things with my hands where I would not need any outside help,” she said, subsequently becoming excited instead by the complete autonomy she felt when making jewellery.

In the late 1990s, Al Qubaisi moved to London to take a foundation course at Chelsea College of Arts. “It was a period of my life with no restrictions,” she recalls. “I felt indestructible. I totally immersed myself and went to a lot of different exhibitions.” In 1997, she went to see Sensation at the Royal Academy, a highly controversial survey of a new generation of Young British Artists that appalled the press and the public for its inclusion of works like Marcus Harvey’s portrait of the murderer Myra Hindley and sexually explicit mannequins by Jake and Dinos Chapman. For Al Qubaisi, the experience challenged all the assumptions about art that she had gathered over years of visiting traditional gallery shows. She was particularly taken by Damien Hirst’s shark suspended in formaldehyde and Rachel Whiteread’s casts of everyday domestic items. “I could not understand why anyone would create it. How could it be art?” she remembers wondering. “That show made me realise why I wanted to be an artist and what kind of artist I wanted to be. It made me realise how people can use any medium to express themselves.”

Although Al Qubaisi’s parents were disappointed by her decision to pursue Jewellery Design and Allied Crafts for her BA, they agreed to support her passion. She enrolled at London Guildhall University and her three years there were a time of “self-discovery” and embracing her identity as a young Emirati woman. “During the holidays, I couldn’t wait to get back to the desert and reconnect with nature,” she says. “It allowed me to see how much I enjoyed hot weather and my country and culture.” Nonetheless, Al Qubaisi’s return to Abu Dhabi after graduating in 2002 was difficult, and she struggled to sell her art. “There were not enough galleries and even if there were collectors, I didn’t have access to them,” she said. Instead, she set up shop at a local air show where she made good contacts but no sales. “They told me that I created beautiful pieces but they were too expensive,” she recalls. “People loved my work, so I knew I had something.” Hoping to be financially independent but unwilling to work in a salaried office position, Al Qubaisi repurposed her artistic skills to make design objects that would be functional and much more affordable. Thanks to repeat clients and a steady income, she hired a team and rented an office in which to oversee production. The profits funded her art practice.

These customised pieces were often corporate gifts or trophies. “Clients usually wanted something that captures an aspect of Emirati culture,” Al Qubaisi says. “Something with a local story to it.” She started researching traditional crafts that she feared were at risk of being forgotten. Although while growing up she had watched her grandmother stitching clothes, her family had forgotten historical Emirati practices like al sadu, a weaving technique used by Bedouin people, al khous, the weaving of palm fronds, and talli embroidery. “How could I evolve these to make contemporary art?” she wondered, and started building a relationship with craftswomen through local initiatives. One project used al khous to make a map of the UAE, in which all seven emirates were knitted together. “We took the method from its traditional context of a woven basket and made something people can proudly place on their desk,” says Al Qubaisi. “Craft became a way to tell a story.”

Experiences like these informed the wall hanging Sea and Desert Weaving (2020), a one-off piece made in collaboration with the Al Ghadeer UAE Crafts organisation, which supports underprivileged women to make sustainable crafts. The team used upcycled scrap material from previous projects that were “re-woven to combine the nostalgia of the past and present in a contemporary way.”

While her design business grew, Al Qubaisi continued to make one-off artworks. These gradually grew larger as she embraced the process of making prototypes for a team of welders. Throughout these works is a reverence for simplicity and, in 2018, she was producing works like Falcon and Houbara 3, which show how a single line can transform into a multidimensional, oscillating wave. Within these uncomplicated forms are often abstracted references to the natural world, as in the series of Dunes sculptures from 2022, as well as to cultural tradition – Arabic script is written along the sleek, feathered forms of Wings of Wisdom (2019). “Part of who we are is our language and ability to address ourselves,” says Al Qubaisi. Her use of rusted steel also reflects how living materials naturally evolve. “I love that aspect of the material’s character,” she says, although some audiences have expressed discomfort with the idea that the artwork is decaying. “We all grow older, wrinkle, change.”

These striking metal constructions were featured in a major solo exhibition at one of the Department of Culture and Tourism’s Art Space venues in 2021, where they caught the eye of New York gallerist Leila Heller. Just two years later, Al Qubaisi was invited to prepare another solo presentation for the gallery’s Dubai location, which opened in 2015. “At first I existed in a place where nobody would buy my work,” she reflects, thinking back to the meagre opportunities for Emirati artists in the early 2000s. “Now the scene has matured with all these new museums and galleries. It’s phenomenal.”

This profile first appeared in Canvas 111: Crafting the Contemporary