Born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq, during multiple wars, my paintings are infused with emotional tension and based on confronting destruction and decay, challenging boundaries through intentional color contrast within gestural landscapes. My interest is to express untold emotional landscapes to suggest the turmoil that can disturb the thin surface of social order and its effect on the human soul. My paintings suggest figures and places, including gardens and war zones, landscapes of lush fertility and terrible decay, cycles of life and death, that are generating order in chaos.

As a first-generation immigrant painter, I address the effects of war and displacement. The foundations of my paintings utilize dark stains and clashing surface textures, which I often disrupt with vibrant paths of color that weave throughout the compositions, reflecting a journey to find harmony within the seeming disorder, fragments and pieces collected, colors from memory. The figures and faces that emerge in these frenzied arrangements are references to the bodies, collective and individual, who have been devastated in wartorn countries like Iraq.