Kuwaiti painter Alymamah Rashed was stuck in traffic on her commute to her studio when the red humaith flower, a spring plant native to the Middle East, caught her eye.
"I stopped in the middle of traffic and plucked as many humaith flowers as I could, to put them in the studio and in my home for my grandmother," she begins.
"When you see it on the sidewalk specifically, it looks like nature's flame."
When Dior's invitation to collaborate on the Lady Dior heritage bag arrived in Alymamah's inbox, the blood-red petals were at the forefront of her mind.
"The image was there," she recalls. "I knew that I wanted to signify the [humaith flower] as a symbol of eternal becoming."
The collaboration, which makes her the third Arab artist to work with the French fashion house, is deeply rooted in heritage and identity.
One bag takes inspiration from the Kuwaiti spring flower; the other from a shell from Failaka Island, which sits 20 kilometres off Kuwait City in the Persian Gulf. These symbols of home are embedded on the bags among sequins and pearl beads, whilst Rashed's trademark motif pierces through: a soulful eye.
The shell, in particular, holds a precious meaning for Alymamah. It begins with the tale of a singing seashell in William Wordsworth's The Prelude. The story — perhaps a lingering echo of Kuwait's history as a British protectorate between 1899 and 1961 — drifted into local folklore, and eventually into the fables of her childhood.
"To me, the seashell represents a way of residing in a home. I just imagined myself being almost inside it, with a transportable home. It spoke to me about the idea of home, maybe not tied to physicality or tied to a location," Alymamah shares with The New Arab.
Alymamah, who studied painting and sculpture at the School of Visual Arts in New York City before completing her master's at Parsons School of Design, was struck by how strongly her Dior collaboration connected with those at home.
"I didn't realise the power of it, and how people resonated with it — specifically in Kuwait — until we announced it. People hadn't noticed these things," she reflects.
What began as a private observation turned into the realisation of something deeply familiar.
"A seashell can be found in many places, and a flower's blooming season can be seen anywhere. They both have this universality to them," Alymamah explains.
Alymamah's motifs invite onlookers to look closely at her work but also at their surroundings for overlooked beauty.
Roots, spirit, and the stories that shaped her art
Born in Kuwait in 1994 to a creative family, Alymamah was always inclined to tell stories and illustrate them.
In her house, storytelling was a family affair. "My dad is a writer, and we used to create our own stories together. I would write the story, and he would help me choose my words," she shares.
Her mother would supply the necessary mediums for illustration: watercolours, crayons and pencils. Alymamah's parents noticed her sharp eye for detail.
"Ever since I was a kid, I had this way of seeing, in terms of looking at people, and looking at things such as a tree, such as a flower, or even a rock, as a spirit. I've had this vision of wanting to defy containment, and wanting to defy what is visible."
This tension unfolds in watercolour and oils on the canvas. Alymamah's paintings include living forms that seem part-human, part-sapling, yet not quite either.
Her paintings show sprawling hands, reaching arms, striking eyes, and arching bodies which intertwine in imperfect union, evoking the friction between independence and collective existence.
Alymamah's I have fixed your roots in the soils of my earth to reach you 7 skies (for I am near your heart), 2024. displays a large tree that anchors fetus-like beings in near-symmetry. The piece looks like an ecological system, connecting body and soul to the land.
The Kuwaiti artist explains the ambiguity in her work. "A lot of people would ask me, are your figures women or men? To me, they float in the in-between. It's about embracing the spirit's femininity, embracing its masculinity, embracing its softness, embracing its monstrosity sometimes."
Alymamah plays with the binaries between the human and the natural, the feminine and the masculine, and the material and the transcendental.
"It has always been very compelling to me, the philosophy of the spirit, how can I compartmentalise the spirit, and how can I gather it again, and perhaps, unionise it," she tells The New Arab.
Her interpretation of the spirit stems from Islamic philosophy, specifically Sufism. Alymamah describes "the seeding of the spirit and how it starts from the breath, how it transcends and how the spirit then becomes humane and so on."
Culture is yet another malleable aspect of her work. "My influences have been rooted in my culture, but also through developing my own culture from being in New York, surrounded by Western philosophies, knowledge and resources. New York is a huge chunk of my journey and my shaping."
The painter's eclectic style has attracted an ever-growing international audience, with recent showings at art fairs in Abu Dhabi, Paris, Brussels, and Los Angeles, as well as interviews with Vogue Arabia and L'Officiel Arabia.
"I've always had this yearning to define and reclaim what home means to me beyond the state of me physically being there, even while I was away," she says.
"So it's like a convergence of being influenced by my home and then really building my own home as well. One that is perhaps not physical. Perhaps that metaphorical home is taking root in galleries and art fairs from Los Angeles to Abu Dhabi."
From watercolour to words
Alymamah shares that she has recently liked working on multiple ideas at once. She uses watercolour, oils, pastels, mica, and sometimes gold leaf, working against the walls and floors of her high-ceilinged studio, often accompanying her pieces with lines of spontaneous poetry.
"I write almost daily about my work and ideas. It's about verbalising what happens in the studio and the epiphanies that happen in between each gesture," she says.
Sometimes these words arrive mid-painting, she adds, other times they come to Alymamah in her dreams, one of which inspired the title of her exhibition: Earth can be as dead as it can be alive, 2023
In the dream, Alymamah was sitting by the seashore with a PC on her lap, searching the internet for an Edgar Allan Poe poem. "The words popped up on the screen, and that became the title of the show," she remembers with a smile.
Similar to a poetic vision, the horizon looks bright for Alymamah Rashed.
The prolific artist has been working on a poetry book this summer, which is set for publication at the end of December. The book includes contributions from a variety of her friends and mentors, including art historian Genevieve Hyacinthe, archaeologist Julie Bonneric and Kuwaiti playwright Sulayman Al Bassam. The idea emerged from her multi-media approach to working in the studio.
So what is next for Alymamah Rashed?
"I want to paint, and there's never enough time to paint everything that I want, but that excites me," she says.
"I think it's like a fuel, that there's this endlessness to expression, and I think we all have that. I always say, remember the magic of the second glance when looking at the mundane, and start from there."
Yasmin Meddour is a British-Algerian journalist and producer based in London. She enjoys writing about global affairs, music, art, and culture, with a special interest in the MENA region