‘It was harrowing,” says artist Shezad Dawood. He’s recalling the time he cast eyes on the personal effects of refugees and migrants who lost their lives in the sea between North Africa and Sicily. Dredged up from the seabed, these possessions included passports, mobile phones, medicine, cigarette packets – and often, small quantities of earth from their homelands, carefully wrapped in plastic or cellophane. “All were heart-rending, but none more so than the last category,” he says.
The items have been incorporated by Dawood, who is based in Hackney Wick, east London, into the Labanof Cycle, a suite of voluminous, elegiac textile tapestries. First he would paint the various possessions, then they would be screen-printed on to luxurious handmade Fortuny fabrics from Venice. The finished works are archives of loss. Objects that were once banal have become precious fragments of a life to be held on to.
