Presence of Absence: Leena Nammari & Louise Ritchie

Leena Nammari
A Village, 2021
Porcelain Paper Clay
12cm x 6cm

Variable Edition
£48

A two-person exhibition exploring the interplay between the practices of Leena Nammari and Louise Ritchie, as artists, peers and collaborators.

Departing from porcelain paper-clay as a material in common, through which both artists reflect on shared themes of belonging and remembrance: in the case of Leena, her Palestinian homeland unreachable during the past two years of disruption, and for Louise, a homeland closer to home, reachable geographically, but now absent of parents. This exhibition does not reflect a nostalgic lens, but rather presents objects that act as evocative placeholders signifying home in the absence of its presence.

How does absence make itself known?

In the disturbance of dislocation

In the urgent need to make new sense of things

In the feeling and evidence that something has been lost

In the slow or sudden awareness that things are different

In the untethering of order

In the instability of familiar ground

In the unexpected recovery of something missing

In a relisation of the distance between

- Miriam Mallallieu on the work of Leena Nammara & Louise Ritchie
Leena experiments with the paper-like structure of porcelain, printing from substrates as variable as photopolymer plates to embroideries, making 'paper planes' and other forms, holding and handling it as you would paper. The motifs and colours that signify community and identity are held within the surface of the porcelain. The fragility and solidity of fired porcelain offered a vehicle for expression, particularly during the lockdown months of the pandemic.

For Leena, the enforced distance from what is home for her, triggered many thoughts about what home means. It never was the grand ideas of nationhood, but the little things, the incidental, the everyday.

There has been a constant theme in her work over the years, it's the little nudges, the little prods that create both comfort and uneasiness, and somewhere therein lies the truth about her sense of belonging.
Louise casts and folds objects with porcelain that express form and surface in unexpected ways. These explore the thin spaces between the then, and the now; the void, or gap, between having and once had. These gaps are formed by what is lost or what should be there, an absence-shaped space, a memory as viewed, or experienced, from the here and now. This work imagines through porcelain print and bronze, what that absence might look and feel like. These are objects to think and remember with, objects as portals to the past.

Some of these spaces are filled with markers derived from photographing found objects, everyday things that are immaterial to those outside of that familial space. These things, through ordinary in their provenance, hold power as they gather importance by their context and things that are passed down through the years and arrive in this time imbued with experience and rememberance. They are material appropriations of family 'heirlooms' that exist in the here and now but also have the power to transport us to a particular place and time as they are reframed to express the shape of the gap, and the shape of the absence.
Artist Biographies

Leena Nammari

Leena Nammari is a Palestinian artist printmaker based in Scotland. She has exhibited within Scotland and Europe, Palestine and Australia as part of group exhibitions and has had a number of solo exhibitions. She is a master printmaker, in all aspects of printmaking, and though her ideas predominantly are analysed and broken down through printmaking processes, she has also worked in film, photography, bronze and ceramics.

She obtained her undergraduate degree in Fine Art Printmaking from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee where she also completed her MFA in Art and Humanities. She has worked in a variety of organisations with various groups and individuals, from Stills in Edinburgh to National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh Academy, Women's Aid, the Cyrenians amongst many, always in pursuit of social engagement in projects, teaching photography and printmaking, with marginalised groups, all the while, maintaining a politically and socially engaged printmaking/making practice.

Her Palestinian heritage and background has always been the backdrop to her making, a kind of story telling as art, a basis to all her work, subtly loaded with the politics of the many, but always reflecting the personal.

Lousie Richie

Exploring the hybridity and materiality of objects through a practice that includes painting, metal-casting, printmaking and ceramics, as well as roles within arts education and collaborations, Louise examines the complex processes and concepts employed by artists in the production of artworks. This reflexive practice brings attention to the fundamental nature of the artistic compulsion; the itch that must be scratched through material making to signify and record the world we experience.

Louise is a lecturer in Contemporary Art Practice at City of Glasgow College/UWS, a PhD Candidate at DJCAD/UoD and a Past-President of the Society of Scottish Artists.
Acknowledgements and Credits

Leena Nammari would like to thank Lorna Fraser, her family and Edinburgh Printmakers. Louise Richie would like to thank Leena Nammari, Roddy Mathieson, Robert Jackson and Kris Copeland. The artists and Edinburgh Printmakers would like to thank Miriam Mallalieu, James Boyer Smith, Alan Dimmick and Tiffany Boyle.