HODA TAWAKOL
Hoda Tawakol’s voluminous textile sculptures and shrewdly crafted installations use the body to explore some of the thorniest issues of our time.
Words by Ayla Jean Yackley
The textile artist Hoda Tawakol interrogates some of the most politically charged issues of the day, and she is having fun doing it. With energy, humour and a hint of the profane, she confronts cultural divides, environmental depredation and female agency in her vibrant fabric collages, mixed-media sculptures and buoyant installations.
The human body lies at the heart of Tawakol’s work, its transformation throughout one lifetime and mutable ideas of beauty across time and borders. Her own fluidity between cultures, careers and societal roles allows her to navigate the breach to draw links imperceptible to most.
Born into an Egyptian family in London in 1968, Tawakol spent the early years of a peripatetic childhood in Frankfurt with her grandparents and nanny before joining her mother in Paris at the age of five. By the time she was 14, she and her older brother were living largely on their own. The maternal figures and the vacuum they left behind occupy the artist’s imagination.
“I was a skinny child, brought up by three opulent women. They had voluptuously shaped bodies with large breasts and thighs. Because I had several mothers in my childhood, I missed out the one mother. And that’s why my vision of a woman is fragmented,” she says. “This paradox of overload and absence comes into my work.”
Her shapeshifting Mummy sculptures (2019–22) are bulbous spheres packed into mesh netting or restrained by ropes, neither human nor simply inanimate. They conjure efforts to pacify the flesh through ritual mummification, as well as Tawakol’s longing for a clearly defined protector.
Likewise, the Nude series (2011–19) hovers between the figurative and abstract, verging on grotesque representations of womanhood. Lacking faces and limbs, they are all breasts and torso with a shock of hair. The Rubenesque statues deceptively exude tenderness, but they are coated in resin, hard as stone. A thin wedge between nurturing and suffocation runs through Lure (2013–20), fabric installations left dangling out of reach that could bury a small child if snapped loose.
She is beginning to investigate ecofeminist theory, which reexamines the human relationship with the natural world as the model of domination implodes with climate change. “Her work has a singularity in linking questions about feminism with nature,” offers the gallerist Isabelle van den Eynde, whose eponymous gallery in Dubai represents Tawakol. “It is very inspiring, not only in terms of the philosophy, but the medium in which she expresses it.”
Van den Eynde credits Tawakol’s late entry into the art world for her “very dynamic, very dedicated and very free” practice. Although she was making art as a child, Tawakol suppressed those aspirations to pursue a corporate career to support her mother financially. It was only after she had her own children that her artistic urges won out. “It all began to shake like a pressure cooker: when you open it, it’s like an explosion,” she explains. At age 38, she entered art school in Hamburg. The nickname her much greener classmates gave Tawakol would prove apt to her work. “They used to call me Mommy,” she recalls.
