Canvas magazine's Issue 116, Time After Time, ran an interview-format profile of Kuwaiti artist Alymamah Rashed built around her commission for Bvlgari's Year of Serpenti initiative. Katrina Kufer sets out Rashed's background, an MFA from Parsons School of Design and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, both in New York, supported by a Kuwait Ministry of Higher Education scholarship and a Professional Development Initiative Program fellowship.
The centrepiece is Your Endless Glory Shimmers Under My Sun (Your Love Stretches Infinitely Beyond Me), painted on handmade French watercolour paper in Japanese watercolour with gold-leaf highlights across the depicted snake's scales; a poem by Rashed appears on the work's reverse. She discusses drawing on Persian mythology, where snakes signify fertility and female empowerment rather than the deception often read into the motif in Western tradition, and describes working the whole of her body into the painting's making. Personal materials recur too, including leaf textures gathered in Turkey's Mountain Lake Forest and dead butterflies found near Kuwait's Jaber Bridge.
The profile, which credits her as represented by Dubai-based Tabari Artspace, reads her snake and eye motifs as recurring devices that let a single commission carry the same themes of identity and folklore found across her gallery practice.
