Soft Dividers begins with my experience as a Muslim woman who wears the veil: the study goes way beyond the immediate materiality of the veil. I search for an understanding of degrees of privacy, be they portable or personal in seen and unseen dividers. This is where I examine how a private space is extended from the home, and how, in public, the veiled Muslim woman navigates female and male spaces. I believe that maintaining this zone of privacy beyond the home and in public, is also linked to the formation of a Muslim woman’s self-identity. Materiality in my study, that is the material form in my artwork, is paramount, over and above my use of image in print, photograph and video. In my practice, I clarify what I mean by the materiality of privacy and how it is linked to ‘shielding’, which I also consider in my practical work. In terms of the symbolic qualities of a veil (or for that matter any curtain or screen), by its very nature it demarcates space and sets up an invisible boundary, which for the outsider, the non-Muslim or a man, becomes a coded signal. Specifically, I investigate what do the soft dividers – ranging from small to large, in layers, in print, in portable and temporal forms across public and private spaces – reveal about privacy? I take one aspect of a simple object and partially transpose its meaning by examining it thus: whereas materiality suggests privacy as something tangible, privacy remains intangible beyond the material.

The sequence of Soft Dividers starts with a small piece of printed textile covering only the participant's face. Through print I confront accepted or normal levels of opacity that ensure the comfort of privacy for the Muslim female body. Women participating in my work offer suggestions as to how much opacity and transparency is needed to protect their sense of privacy.

Because privacy is invisible and intangible, I need to suggest its visibility and tangibility, and I echo Albers, starting with the veil as a 'light and material' portable zone of privacy. Therefore, I was curious to understand the material and immaterial boundaries of privacy. Any material can take on the burden of what had been brewing in our consciousness or sub-consciousness, in our awareness or in our dreams. This led me to work with veiled Muslim women in workshops, in which we collectively scaled up soft divisions to interrogate the agency of the veil, its limits and where its sense of privacy begins.

Now, the layering in my artwork operates on several levels; with pigment, fabric, transparency and colour. Stitching layers of fabric together also creates additional levels of layering where the fabrics overlap, leading to new opacities. During the workshops we talked about the practice of veiling, and we printed simple scaled-up veils into soft, portable and fluid dividers that became different kinds of veils, but that the women felt still protected their sense of privacy. When the women first printed a small piece of fabric, they felt it was less like a veil, but more like a decoration because of its light colours and pattern: they preferred a veil to be dark. They explained how they felt about scaling up a veil from a small piece of fabric that only covered their face, to a divider – a larger piece of fabric held up in front of a woman’s body.

Generally, as I move between cultures, I recognise the same need for privacy in London as I do in Riyadh: my creative practice becomes a way to cope with this, allowing me to maintain an internal comfort zone. I transpose the Al Sadu tent divider into a new form which becomes a soft wall. I bring it into public space, a result of moving between London and Riyadh, so that the veil – the divider – continues to give me, and Muslim women, a sense of privacy, regardless of cultures. When I break the veil down to its basic form, the abaya, which is a full-body cover or the veil extended, it is just a simple piece of fabric, designed, cut, sewn, and wrapped around the body, just like the basic form of any other women's garment. However, the difference between the abaya and most western women’s apparel is that the abaya offers a level of privacy for women in a public space. Although the abaya is a powerful garment, it can skew non-Muslim understanding of a Muslim woman. Wearing the abaya, I may be judged to have no individuality, no real identity, but to embody the impossible composite of a woman as terrorist, backward, uneducated and trapped at home. When I first arrived in London, the city felt naked to me, devoid of privacy with a parade of exposed flesh on offer. Confronted by this, I wondered if I shared this discomfort with other veiled women. I also sensed that the veil is part of forming an identity, and what actually makes the shrouded Muslim woman into someone. She is not invisible behind her veil.

As my research progressed, Soft Dividers became increasingly architectural, incorporating walls as my need for privacy increased during my time living in London and entering public spaces. The cubicle artwork I made uses four dividers to form a soft room with three fluid walls mounted against one solid wall. In the image above, the dividers are not a garment. Nevertheless, the layers of flat fabric arranged in a cubicle mimic a garment-like structure, although the cubicle artwork is not worn but walked into and occupied. Added layers, whatever form they take, construct comfortable levels of shielding.

During the time of my first documenting their movements into and out of the cubicle the participants did not take or ask if they could take any photos. Only towards the end, did they ask if I minded photographing them. I was surprised by the women’s desire to have any personal photographic record. They too seemed to feel a need to document their experience. As a result of this, documenting the human experience with and within the artwork and the participants being part of the artwork became increasingly important to me. I understood that the development of the artwork itself, and also the exchange between artist and participant or viewer is linked to documentation. As a result of these new understandings, documentation of this project began to incorporate notions of ownership of the experience, in particular ownership around textiles and space, and how the participants see their privacy, in relation to the textile and how textiles represent the materiality of privacy for them to start to own the experience of the object. This was an unexpected addition to my practice. I decided to shift the level as well as position of the concepts of occultation. I became the observer and the women the directors, as well as the creators of the experiences. This is one aspect of PAR, where the participants become collaborators in the artwork. I found that the presence and involvement of the women participants pushed the research forward and changed the direction of the artwork. The women being documented or documenting themselves raises the understanding of the experience and therefore the multi-layered nature of an Arab Muslim sense of privacy.

By using layers of print on textiles to create different levels of transparency, and fluid and soft boundaries, I suggest that privacy lies in between the material and the immaterial. Layers and the constant acts of veiling and unveiling also confuse our understanding of who is the observer and who is the participant. As I tested how textile can create layers of privacy, my research developed into an exploration underpinned by a metaphysical notion more conceptual than the previous concrete printed shapes. Veiling the Veil, as I titled this exploration, shows the sequence of movement as a woman emerges from the semi-transparent divider of soft textile. She moves between the additional soft divider layer, her veil-layer and her clothing. The soft divider and the veil are temporal extensions of each other. They perform the same function. Veiling the Veil presents a sequence of still images of the body as it moves in front of and behind the material, so that the full flow of movement can be thoroughly grasped. This slow-motion tracking of movements is one way of documenting my work. It re-enacts how privacy is manifested in the way a body approaches or distances.