Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman

Bio

Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman is a graduate of Concordia University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2020). She has been awarded the Salt Spring National Art Prize Joan McConnel Award and is a recipient of the Canada Council of the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council grant (2023). She was a finalist for the Emerging IBPOC Artist Award (2023). Her solo exhibition, Praises Unsung, is currently on view at the FOFA Gallery (2024). She has previously exhibited at Ottawa City Hall (2023), Digital Art Resource Centre (2022), Gallery 101 (2022), and Ottawa Art Gallery (2021). She has also led creative workshops with the Ottawa Art Gallery, Somerset West Community Health Centre, and the Ottawa Catholic School Board (2021-23). Her work is held in various private collections, including the City of Ottawa Art Collection and the Art Volt Collection. Most recently, she completed a three-month residency with Residency Unlimited (RU) in Brooklyn, NY.

Artist Statement

My mixed media paintings, collages, and video works illustrate topics of memory, caretaking, and the notion of home. With a distant relationship to my parents’ homelands in Somalia and India, this constant search for home often appears in my work. I refer to this sentiment as the “second chase” when diasporic communities are met with discrimination that initiates a longing to return to the homeland and elicits a need to connect to community, family, and country.

My practice raises the importance of storytelling as a form of resistance and how care and self-preservation can act as modes to combat systems of oppression. These vibrant large-scale compositions, which appear to be childlike and playful, allow the works to be approachable yet confrontational.

I’m interested in healing through art making and how to engage in critical discussions of the cultural landscape without adding to the overconsumption of traumatic imagery. I address healing from grief and the burden of memory, ancestral trauma, and the inner child. With personal references to nostalgic colours and symbols from my childhood, my works aspire to nurture moments of the past. They allow me to heal through joy and humour and to care for my younger self through a lens of empathy.

Using family archives, collage, and abstraction, my mixed media works offer an authentic mode of documentation beyond what is physically represented in the photograph. I insert references to my hand and the art-making process, such as the Photoshop transparent layer, as an invitation into this ongoing connection to memory.