Scene XIV: Nada Elkalaawy, A Stir of Echoes

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, October 2025

We two kept house, the Past and I,
The Past and I;
I tended while it hovered nigh,
Leaving me never alone …

Thomas Hardy, The Ghost of the Past, (the first four lines of his poem, written c. 1912-13 after the death of his wife, Emma).

I: VEILS

One never exists in a single tense or dimension. The texture and simultaneity of our lives inveigh against campaigns or prophecies for existential understanding that are predicated on the linear, mechanical or ordained. Those being sequences that serve to corral and control the many by the few. Our passage from birth to life to death is not merely a progression from one state to another; it is a journey – a flux – coloured by different times, spaces and surfaces, more so by our (in)ability to navigate and negotiate these ever-evolving tectonic plates of substance or spirit. So it is that the past ever whispers itself back into being, trickling through the terrain of our conscious experience as streams of tremulous, delicate yet inviolable ambiguity. Rather than seek definition or guide the direction of our journey, such spectral susurrations coalesce as fond memories, sombre grief or bitter regrets, clinging onto our pillars of presence in our moments in time to affect a momentary discombobulation. The past does not stop our journey through the present; it just changes its shape, stretching time, expanding space and deepening the surface of our experience through arcs of transmission and perhaps even transportation. What was and what is now a Möbius Strip that ensures time never stands still, even if life, at times, feels at a standstill.

It is from this haunting interrogation of time and surface that Nada Elkalaawy begins her creative journey. Born and raised between Egypt and London now living and working in London, Elkalaawy both understands and is fascinated by various dialects of dislocation. Her pluralist enterprise (she paints, draws, stitches and animates as an artist) focuses on both the concepts – and her lived experiences – of loss, grief, time and memory and, especially in her painting, how she employs both the lexis and praxis of layering to evince this multilaminate of thought. As both formal design and emotional strategy, Elkalaawy employs layering to see back in time or to find portent in the present; to articulate the defying iridescence of presence as well as the dark suffocation of absence. These layers function like painterly veils, added only for the viewer to remove, so that a constant tension between preservation and erasure permeates the artist’s surfaces, their subjects and their ultimate revelation. Constant glazing sees an original painted image knocked back to a stage of apparitional or hallucinogenic uncertainty, over which another image is layered, phrased, equally, by a series of delicate glazes. The result is a haunting surface that looks how memory recalls: fragmented, inchoate and enigmatic.

Nada Elkalaawy, Night Watch, 2024-25, Oil on canvas, 168 x 122 cm (66 1/8 x 48 in)

Elkalaawy’s enterprise is beautifully parlayed in her large painting, Night Watch (2024-25). A bouquet of red, almost-wilting poppies sits in a vase, visited by what appears to be a butterfly. Resting by the vase is a crumple of what looks like white fabric: discarded tissues, perhaps, torn and teared. The Still Life plays against an indigo backdrop, floppily corrugated like a thick curtain. The mood is clearly melancholic: poppies symbolise remembrance and hope only because they are connected to death; the torn tissue alludes to the shedding of tears; the butterfly signifies rebirth but, again, only after one state of being has been discarded for another. Colour seems drained of its usual vibrancy: the poppies have an almost daguerreotype-like varnish to what should be their bright, crimson petals. Likewise, the blue drapes seem to sigh in heavy, matte palpation, their dilution only rescued by traces of lilac that enliven that misty ground. It is that little flicker of lilac, however, that opens the painting up, optically and intellectually.

As one looks closer one soon finds two eyes just to the right of the butterfly, staring out of the picture plane. The longer one looks, the quicker these eyes crystallise and the harder they stare. A small figure begins to reveal itself in the upper right corner. Slowly, over time, space and mood shift. Like fog over a moor, the landscape of meaning changes, as obfuscation nourishes illumination, because of the artist’s poetic yet insistent layering. The already maudlin tone of Elkalaawy’s liminal surface is now made more cryptic and richer because of it; the fixity of being now flummoxed into a series of gentle reverberations, bouncing between recollection and invention. Night Watch began as an entirely different – and complete – composition: a woman, at three-quarter pose, in white chemise and draped in a patterned shawl, rests against the arm of a chair as she holds up her face, turning it to confront the viewer. Behind her is a porcelain figurine of Cupid; to her right a cascade of blue, draped velvet pushes her out of the pictorial space. This figure is entirely fictional, providing a past moment designed to be abandoned, glazed over by coats of time, but which loses no less impression on the present and our experience of it.

Nada Elkalaawy, Night Watcher, 2025, oil on canvas, 15 x 15 cm (5 7/8 x 5 7/8 in)

The superimposed image of the poppies is a real but found one, taken from an autochrome photograph. The stoic yet longing mien of a young woman, accompanied by the god of desire as she hopes to catch our eye, feeds into the somewhat bittersweet yearning that these poppies emblematise. As with most memories, fiction here interrupts reality, so that Elkalaawy’s veiling, in turn, becomes an act of unveiling; the painting now a confession that can only emerge from the dialectic between what was and is. Elkalaawy then brings the journey of her original image (and index) not to its end but back to its beginning with a tiny jewel of a painting, Night Watcher (2025). The woman, inexorably subsumed by evanescent wisps of mark and time in Night Watch, is now resurrected; the close-up of her quiet, dreamy face now depicted in fleshy fidelity, so that she stares, once more, directly at the viewer, challenging them to deny her a reality that never existed in the first place.

II: VANITAS

Nada Elkalaawy, Faint Embers, 2025, Oil on canvas, 168 x 214 cm (66 1/8 x 84 1/4 in)

Memory is so often haunted by loss and enriched by the grief that laments it. Orbiting around much of Elkalaawy’s creative strategy is an effort to distil the dynamic of grief: an act that seeks sustainment in the face of release, knowing that any such effort will – and can only – offer a mere shimmer of resurrection. It is no surprise, then, to see Elkalaawy turn to the subject of flowers, and the specific genre that much informs the subject: vanitas painting. Faint Embers (2025) is dominated by a vase of juicy yellow and purple poppies, mirrored by its own reflection, and thrust to the front of the picture plane. Ebbing in and out of the painting’s vaporous background is the face of a young boy, set against a non-descript background that was, in its initial iteration, a mosaic of several images: an armchair, children playing outside, a building or school and silhouettes of palm trees. A congregation or tessellation that already reads like a memory. These are the faint embers, barely but still burning in Elkalaawy’s warm palette of ochre, rust and burnt sienna tones, but it is the flowers themselves – the phoenix rising from those embers – that offer the memorial for the original image and its protagonists.

The artist’s exploration of the vagaries and verities of the Vanitas vernacular is telling because these paintings of flowers, fruits, skulls and other memento mori occupy the past, present and future. They are object, subject and abject all rolled into one multivalent agency, only to be unfurled into the unknown. It is that engagement with the ‘other’ – that shrouded state of dark uncertainty – that piques and propels Elkalaawy’s interest in this genre. Such paintings speak to the transience of life, with the flowers’ bloom and bounty but a moment away from their (and our) irrevocable condensation. The genre allows Elkalaawy the opportunity to control her composition and, moreover, lend further gravitas to her superimposition of image and index. However, it also allows the artist a moment to indulge in a certain fluster – a kind of beautiful panic where one does not exactly ‘see straight’ and which, here, is described by pacific blossoms that radiate with a scintillating energy yet bleed with a bruised melancholy, leaving both artist and viewer strangely comforted yet a little distraught.

Nada Elkalaawy, Close Companions, 2025, oil on canvas, 122 x 168 cm (48 x 66 1/8 in)

Close Companions (2025) continues this line of direction, with the vase of flowers now a bountiful bouquet of fleshy roses, but executed in an obsidian, funereal spectrum of tones, from gunmetal greys to pitch blacks. The flowers no longer declare the slippage between life and death but, rather, welcome the finality, not the inevitability of the end. Elkalaawy’s flowers remain fragile and vulnerable, but their mournful state is lifted by the luscious efflorescence of their bloom. As with all the artist’s paintings, the title here does not give much away. That is until the viewer takes yet another closer look. Hidden inside the flowers are more eyes, this time feline, and slowly, but surely, the misty shape of a cat’s head and ears begins to unveil itself. The original image was one of a pair of cats (ceramic feline figurines resplendent in bow ties), also executed in this shadowy, umbral palette, save for their piercing green eyes. The pair of cats are the close companions the title refers to but, in many cultures, cats are associated with bad luck, death and the afterlife. As such, it is the hand of death that holds together the cats and the flowers here; the former signifying the future; the latter speaking to the present and their close companionship whispered by an echo from the past.

III: HEIRLOOMS

Nada Elkalaawy, Heirloom, 2025, Oil on canvas, 112 x 183 cm (44 1/8 x 72 in)

The passing of time is nowhere more concretised than in the inheritance of objects passed down from one generation to another. Elkalaawy transforms such objects – silver tureens or ornate antiques – into vessels that speak to a physical suspension, historical condensation but, above all else, to the continued animation of the motif as both object of desire and burden of legacy. Whiffs of aristocracy meet an estrangement of form ordinarily adumbrated by canons of horror or science fiction in Elkalaawy’s Heirloom (2025). A large silver tureen, then loved but now, it would seem, given its monumental isolation, somewhat sidelined, is executed in a palette of acidic mustards that simultaneously relays an aureate lustre as well as the oleaginous goo of a chameleon’s skin. The tureen owns almost of the pictorial space, pushed to the very edges of the canvas, with only the wisps of a former, found, foliar background offering some separation between object, ground and their contest. The dominance of the object within the elongated horizontal frame, coupled with the hazy, mustard mist that envelops it, does lend the tureen a pregnant uncanniness. It could be mistaken for a UFO or even a temple, further alienating its already estranged shape, colour and thus meaning.

By deliberately eschewing the compositional security proffered by perspective, architecture or denotation, Elkalaawy lets her objects and subjects linger on her canvas. Much as an heirloom lingers in a family for generations, drifting from use and desire to abandonment and neglect yet mustered by the memory of the forefather who first acquired it. This conscious withholding of information – text, subtext or context – plays a profound role in the artist’s craft. The unresolved status of her surfaces provides just enough to lure the viewer in but without offering any explication. It is in this haze that the very heart of Elkalaawy’s practice beats. It conceals and confounds yet it reveals and rewards – the act of looking and the art of unravelling the layered strategy – of mark and meaning – at play here.

Nada Elkalaawy, Lustre, 2025, Oil on canvas board, 51 x 20.3 cm (20 1/8 x 8 in)

Lustre (2025) continues the conversation between obfuscation and revelation. A curious, decadent little mantle lustre (a rather flamboyant candle holder based on an image Elkalaawy found online) is once again knocked back into a palette of creams and caramels so that, ironically, it is the gloss or skin of time rather than the lambency of gold or glass that prevails. Again, Elkalaawy squeezes her object into a forcefully vertical space, pinning it down and shedding an unforgiving light on it as if preparing it for interrogation, yet it is not the object that is necessarily our chief concern. The absence of any reason – emotional or material – for such a vigorous presentation, in turn, becomes the focus of the painting. Its lustre lies in the time it holds us as a viewer but also the waves of time – and their echoes – it has already sailed. Again, this proposes a rather slippery signification for both object and painting: one predicated on the fluidity of time and the mosaic of memory but which purports to celebrate the sheen or brilliance of an object fixed in time and space. The tension between the two broils on a surface that ultimately speaks to both.

IV: PENTIMENTI

Elkalaawy’s surfaces seem to teem with an accidentality that keeps the viewer not a little mystified in that it at first remains abundantly unclear as to whether this precarious state of layering is consciously orchestrated or not. This fortuity stems from the artist’s search for a timelessness: a happenstance that evokes both happening and happened locked into her object, the often-nebulous ground that supports it and, of course, the clever craft she employs to articulate it. Pentimenti are those tiny little errors, overpainted, that lie beneath the visible surface. Ordinarily they are erased yet, for Elkalaawy, they function like heirlooms: treasured gifts from a bygone era that have the power to shift gesture and meaning. The artist’s re-working of older canvases is more than just a negotiation of an old image, but of colour, tone, density and structure – the very building blocks of composition. As such, Elkalaawy’s interest in the pentimento – that one piece of the past that glows through to the present – is not solely concerned with the layering of image but, by extension, with the nexus of techniques and faculties.

Nada Elkalaawy, Dome of Collectibles, 2024, Oil on canvas board, 50 x 40 cm (19 3/4 x 15 3/4 in)

These pentimenti – visually and conceptually – occupy a crucial space in Elkalaawy’s concept. Sitting between two states – that of the ground (the beginning) and the finished image (the end) – these moments mark out an ‘in-between state’ of place and emotion, reality and fiction, consciousness and subconsciousness, desire and fear. Dome of Collectibles (2024) shows a tableau of kitschy porcelain figures encased in a glass dome. The hyaline sheen on the dome is punctuated by streaky marks that serve to illustrate a reflection of a body outside of the picture plane or, perhaps, record a blemish on the original photograph that is the source for the painting. Elkalaawy now cleverly plays with the viewer, teasing one fiction into another, one reality into another, to establish a truth that only ever confirms itself as a painted surface. Pentimenti are now enzymes that nurture the anxiety or flux innate to an ‘in-between state’: neither, nor yet both, they dance between ground, tense and source, celebrating each layer, dilution and omission as they coax prior into present.

V: ECHOES

Elkalaawy is a painter blessed with an alchemical touch, yet her phrasing does not transform so much as it transmits. Palpating in each of her glazed layers, and in each sparkle of kaleidoscopic iridescence that embellishes those layers, is her conveyance of time and, importantly, the stir of its endless echo. Reverberations both found and experienced glister on silver and crystal heirlooms or haunt nebulous grounds with physiognomic abbreviations, ocular and oracular, that ebb in and out of dimensional registration. Likewise, Elkalaawy’s brush dispatches moments articulated firmly in the present tense, defying the inevitability of any moment’s inexorable end, even as that demise shimmers as obsidian promises in the delicate lustre of flesh and flowers. Rather than capture the mutation of one tense or state into another, the artist unveils time and space as an ever-evolving envelopment.

Nada Elkalaawy, A Summoning, 2025, Oil on canvas, 61 x 76 cm (24 x 29 7/8 in)

A Summoning (2025) perfectly captures this stir of echoes, flitting between ‘is’ and ‘was’, past and present melded together to evince some kind of object-based epigenetic change that speaks to our collective, human inheritance of personality, persuasion and point. Another elegant silver tureen sits atop a table. A kaleidoscope of bokeh-like lights showers down upon the antique, curiously drawing attention away from the object and, instead, illuminating the heads of five young, pig-tailed girls whose presence whispers beneath the ground. That image is another fictional composition based on a found image of triplets which the artist has once again mirrored into an even stranger line up of quintuplets that, again, speaks to Elkalaawy’s fascination with the bizarre and magical and which, of course, perfumes her tableau with a spray of irony that reveals her rather wry sense of humour. The act of mirroring her subterranean protagonists offers a visual strategy and intellectual resolution that chimes neatly with both the dynamic and design of memories as arcs of power but also of play, intended to fill cloudy, pensive gaps of uncertainty with a joy and even jest born from recollection, then amplified or multiplied, to finally become its own fabrication. Such quirky playfulness not only adds to the idiosyncrasy of Elkalaawy’s paintings but offers a little light relief from their melancholy. After all, the ghosts of grief draw out tears of woe and laughter in those through which they pass as they fuel and fold memories.

Those echoes – real, imagined and their whimsical hybrids – then stir other echoes – memories of index – that come with the object itself. The tureen exists as a rather lavish soup server, but it also evinces the shape, ornamentation and scintillation we associate with magic: Aladdin’s lamp or Harry Potter’s goblet of fire, both which exist as gateways between one dimension and another, fashioned by magic and used to change reality through wish-fulfilment. The dazzle of lights that floats above this tureen could be the summoning of a genie so that this sparkle – like pentimenti – bridges the real and the ethereal. It is that synergy between found and fabricated; between real and imagined; between flesh and fantasy that fills Elkalaawy’s paintings with such exquisite poetry.

Nada Elkalaawy, Surface Memory, 2025, Oil on canvas board 60.3 x 30.3 cm (23 3/4 x 11 7/8 in)

Surface Memory (2025) provides a neat summary of all the tributaries of thought and interrogation that feed into Elkalaawy’s exacting, curious practice. An urn, designed to hold the ashes of the recently passed, commands the shape of the artist’s support, ironically possessing a domination and dominion that the now cremated figure inside it no longer enjoys. That memory is then juxtaposed with the memory of the pattern that embellishes the urn’s surface: itself a memory of a past design. Memory not only triggers Elkalaawy’s surface into life; it becomes it. The subtlety and nuance of her achingly beautiful paintings often provide a veneer that somewhat shields a more complex interest in notions of passing, be they temporal, emotional, historical, familial or artistic, but not here. What Surface Memory – as object, subject, surface, memory and strategy – does is reveal the true nature of Elkalaawy’s project: to unveil our entanglement of experience: personal, collective and the echo chamber of their synergy. It is here where the power of this wonderful artist’s enterprise breathes – in Hardy’s houses of ‘the ghost’ and ‘I’ – unsettling surface to create a deeper sense of space so that her painted inventions may float into the viewer’s consciousness and, just for a moment, bewitch like beloved memories.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
27-29 October 2025