Nadia Haji Omar

Across a dyed and muted ground run rows of small marks, lines and dots that carry the rhythm of writing and yet spell nothing a reader could sound out. Nadia Haji Omar composes these fields as a language of her own, hovering between script, map and textile, and the invention answers a real condition: a childhood spent among more tongues than any single country could hold.

She was born in Melbourne in 1985, of Syrian, Indian and Sri Lankan descent, and grew up in Sri Lanka before her practice settled in the United States, where she now lives and works in Warren, Rhode Island. As a child she moved between Arabic, Sinhala, Tamil and French; that early plurality, rather than any one line of heritage, became the ground of the work. She studied at Bard College and took an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2014.

Her method begins in dyeing. She works a pattern into the fabric, wipes it down to a quiet ground, then lays over it acrylic washes and a vocabulary of notational marks made of lines and dots. Out of the scripts she carries, Sinhala and Tamil among them, she builds characters that belong to none of them: an alpha-numeric abstraction that reads as cartography and as language in the same glance, its imagery folding invented letters into references to landscape, mapping and woven pattern. The critic John Yau has described the result as a non-discursive visual language, one that declines the easy exoticism of borrowing another culture’s ornament and makes cultural hybridity itself the subject. The work refuses to be sorted into a single origin, which is precisely its argument.

Those fields have found rooms on both sides of her biography. She has shown with Kristen Lorello in New York, where her 2018 exhibition ‘Ellipsis’ gathered small paintings a critic likened to cartographic dreams, and with Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo; she was commissioned for the ‘On the Wall’ series at Providence College Galleries in 2018; and her paintings have entered the collection of the RISD Museum in Providence. The reach across two art worlds mirrors the plurality the paintings are built from.

What the marks finally record is legible to no reader and familiar to anyone who has lived between languages: a script for the space between places, written by a painter who learned early that home can be a grammar as much as a country.