Year of completion: 2026
Medium: Mixed-media assemblage installation with single channel video projection.
Size: Approximately 120cm × 120cm × 75 cm
Additional information: Exhibition view from Winter Open House, Delfina Foundation, London. Curated by Amani Mitha.
Materials used: Round table, embroidered tablecloth, found domestic objects (silver teapot, crystal goblet, incense, jewellery, glass vessels, framed photographs, wooden keepsake box, feather, mirror, vintage photo-negatives), single channel video projection.
Developed during my time in residency at the Delfina Foundation, Once I Set a Bone Alight, and Saw a Country is a speculative altar that extends my textile practice into installation, translating weaving into a multisensory form. Personal and ritual materials, including photo negatives, family photographs, frankincense and myrrh, a Somali talismanic necklace, inherited objects, and projected moving image, are assembled within a space activated by a Somali women's weaving song (Heesta Kabada).
Rather than treating weaving solely as a material process, the work understands it as a way of holding memory together. Sound, scent, image, and object become interlaced threads through which absence is carried, reconfigured, and made perceptible. The weaving song moves through the installation, binding its disparate elements into a shared rhythm and transforming the space into one of listening as much as looking.
Engaging mourning as a durational and embodied practice, the installation considers how ancestral presence is held, transmitted, and reactivated through repetition, voice, and ritual. The objects gathered here are both intimate and ceremonial. Some are inherited from family, while others draw on Somali ritual traditions. Together they function less as relics than as living vessels, carrying traces of those who are absent while refusing the fixed nature of a memorial.
The work imagines the altar as a structure capable of listening, a place where grief becomes audible and memory is sustained not through preservation alone, but through continual acts of return, invocation, and care.
“And sometimes the ghosts pass through us & sometimes they inhabit another kind of skin. We merge & we become something larger than this one life, we merge and we become eternal.”
-Excerpt from my mythopoetic text Everything Except Our Ghosts Are Perishable
Video stills from a Somali Women’s Weaving Song Heesta Kabada projected onto the speculative altar.
“Everyday you wake you raise the dead, everything you do is a miracle.”
-Danez Smith
Detail images of v vOnce I Set A Bone Alight & Saw A Country (2026)