Critical textMona Saudi

As one of the few women sculptors of her generation to carve a place for herself in the Arab world, Jordanian artist Mona Saudi (1945, Amman – 2022, Beirut) lived proudly through her regional heritage. Driven by a lifelong quest to explore the inner workings of the Earth and secret aspects of life and the human body, Saudi performed all her own carving, sometimes working for eighteen hours uninterrupted. Leaning into the Islamic notion of takween (whatever is divinely decreed, that will happen at its appropriate time), she would start with simple geometrical shapes as to flow with principles of movement and composition, until she could draw warmth out of cold stone. Inspired by Brancusi’s desire to sculpt “not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things”, she named her first sculpture in stone Mother/Earth (1965). She conceived her practice as a spiritual process, in which ascension was achieved. Her drawings informed her sculptural forms, and she frequently took inspiration from Mesopotamian art, ancient Egyptian sculptures, and the early stages of classical Greek culture. She was a writer and lover of poetry and declared sculpture to be “an embodiment of poetry, saying what is not said, touching what is not touched”. Saudi’s studies in Paris coincided with the student demonstrations that broke out across France in 1968, which had a deep impact on her and led her to work with the displaced children at the Baqa’a Palestinian camp in her homeland Jordan. She then joined the art department of Palestine Liberation Organization and created several posters as a supporter of the cause. Saudi lived and worked for five decades in Beirut, where she continued to sculpt until the end of her life.