Masi Naidj - MA Fine Art
Ghosts of Belonging
In my work, stones return not as objects to be described but as fragments of a home I cannot fully locate. For me, home is not geography but a shifting condition; fragile, unstable, suspended between presence and absence, memory and forgetting. This sense has been shaped by migration, by living between languages and places, where belonging is always partial and unsettled.
The stones in my paintings are more than natural forms. They act as carriers of history and memory, silent witnesses holding what words cannot. Their stillness suggests permanence, yet their silence speaks of loss.
Materials are central to how these ideas unfold. I often work with walnut ink, because its unstable marks can blur, fade, or be erased, leaving traces that resemble memory itself; fragile, partial and always shifting. Silverpoint is the opposite: its lines resist erasure but quietly oxidise over time, as if the drawing keeps changing long after it is made. These materials allow me to explore both permanence and impermanence, presence and disappearance.
Recent works such as Breath Between, Almost a Place, and Where Absence Settles move toward reduction. Colour is restrained, forms are withheld, and stones stand in charged intervals; between falling and rising, being held and released. They do not resolve but remain unsettled, quietly alive.
My practice takes shape where opposites meet; between lightness and weight, silence and speech, presence and absence. I do not aim to resolve these tensions but to create spaces where they can be felt directly, alive at the threshold between saying and not saying, where presence and loss coexist in fragile balance.
