Fatima Akhtar - BA (Hons) Fine Art
Fatima is a sculptor from the Black Country. She works with a variety of mixed media, specifically with a focus on textiles. Her work explores the narrative and experiences of women in the city, highlighting struggles and power dynamics between gender. Creating hanging forms, stretched installations, projections, and sound, the sculptures have underlying themes of the abject.
This is a poem she wrote embodying her work as a whole:
Whispers are woven with threads, worn and frail,
Embodying a tension in the fabric as it reaches out,
Stretching and yearning, twisting and tearing.
Each fold, layer after layer,
Conceals stories of fears they silently embrace,
And echoes of a journey of untold paths.
The pilling jumper revealing truths,
Through its sweat stained collar and discoloured underarms
Of resounding footsteps and her heart pounding.
Thump, thump.
But no one nears.
Thump, thump.
As the night grows dark, the shadows dance,
The murmurs become louder, and her burdens hang heavy,
The stitching breaks as its baggage buckles,
Oozing and weeping, the body falls.
The seams become fragile, worn and frail.
