Fragile — Works — Marya Mayan

The Idea

"All structures are unstable."

— Eckhart Tolle

Fragile begins from the idea that the stability of things is bound to the relations that give them their shape and identity. Every structure rests on a particular arrangement among its elements, and every arrangement carries within it the possibility of change.

Marya Mayan works with natural loofah, drawing on its passage from living fruit to exposed fibrous mesh. Through that process the material moves between different states and functions, before entering the work to undergo a new stage of reshaping.

Through folding, compressing, binding, dyeing, and the use of light and void, Marya reorganises this structure into sculptural bodies that hold the traces of their earlier states while taking on a new presence.

A thing is a temporary arrangement of relations.

هش — Fragile — Marya Mayan — Private collection.

Biomimicry

The loofah's fibrous web mirrors the hidden architectures of the living body — the same branching networks that build us from within.

Osseous tissue

Human bone

Retina

Human eye

Vascular

Human heart

Neurons

Human brain

Loofah

Plant fiber

Light and Void

The porous structure of the loofah lets light pass through it, so void and shadow become part of the sculpture's composition. The reading of the form shifts with the angle of view, the lighting, and its position in space.

Material and Transformation

The loofah begins as a plant fruit; as it ripens and dries, its inner fibrous tissue is laid bare. What was a hidden part of the fruit's structure becomes its visible surface, then moves into a new function and a new context.

In Fragile, that transformation continues through the artist's intervention. The material is reworked without erasing its history, so each form carries the trace of what it was and the possibility of what it might become.

Reshaping

Folding, compressing, binding, and dyeing are not only means of forming a shape; they are processes that alter the relations within the material itself. With every intervention the organisation of the mesh changes, and with it the form of the thing, the way it is present, and the way it is read.

Each work becomes a temporary state within an ongoing course of reorganisation, its identity still open to change as material, structure, and context change.

Within the Practice

Fragile extends from Marya Mayan's inquiry into how meaning takes shape out of the relations binding material, context, and experience. The project uses the transformation of the loofah to examine the object as a moving structure, its identity shifting whenever the conditions that give it form and meaning shift.

Part of a journey

Fragile is part of an ongoing artistic journey that unfolds through a series of interconnected works — a continued meditation on the unseen, formless dimensions within us.

Fragile Ogbal — The Waiting Chair Doubt