Drawing as a Portal

My work reflects on overlooked spaces in the urban landscape as sites where cultural memory, migration, and personal narrative intersect. Working across drawing, collage, and digital media, I am drawn to the symbolic presence of lone trees positioned within the urban nature strip, spaces suspended between public infrastructure and private life. Within these environments, the tree becomes an archetypal presence: a quiet witness to resilience, displacement, endurance, and belonging.  Drawing as a Portal extends this ongoing dialogue through a layered visual language that merges hand-drawn gesture, collage, and digital intervention. The composition transforms the urban tree into a theatrical, almost cinematic presence, suspended within an energetic field of colour informed by local observation and by visual references drawn from Middle Eastern art and culture.  Embedded QR codes function both as compositional elements and as gateways into expanded digital space. They operate as visual interruptions within the drawing while simultaneously connecting the physical artwork to moving image and sound. In this way, the work repositions drawing beyond the static surface, allowing it to become an immersive, evolving experience that traverses analogue and digital realms.  Please scan any of the QR codes using your mobile phone to access the digital portal for the moving-image work Dancing the Tree (2023), along with a curated selection of award-winning short films. The repeated QR codes reinforce the rhythm and visual structure of the composition while inviting the viewer into an expanded cinematic experience beyond the physical artwork.  The drawing becomes more than an image; it becomes a site of activation, memory, and exchange — a contemporary portal through which personal histories, cultural identities, and urban experience converge.