Leila el Rayes

Born 1995 in Sydney, Australia
Lives and works in Sydney

UNSW Galleries

Rippled Water, 2023
canvas, board and nails

Courtesy the artist

In packing nails tightly into an intricate pattern, Leila el Rayes is inspired by her Palestinian and Egyptian heritage, recalling geometric patterns, art, and tapestries. The nails’ figurations transform into tessellating designs, appearing at once staunch and beautiful.

Placed individually by hand, each nail is acknowledged by their organic steel origins.

Repurposed and processed into new molecular structures and forms, the work in turn, meditates on the symbiotic cycle and balance between hardship and unity. el Rayes interrogates the complexity of destruction to find moments of intricacy and beauty that defy categorisation, and flow between ideas of fragility and fierceness.

Leila el Rayes’ work celebrates vulnerability by fusing identities and contexts. Working across sculpture, performance, video and text, her practice explores hardship, desire and uncertainty to find moments of meditative intricacy, fragility and beauty. Her material choices are often deeply philosophical. For el Rayes, her use of nails acknowledges their organic origins, repurposed and processed over time into new molecular structures with new man-made uses. The individual nails are harsh but, in el Rayes’ configurations, they become things of integrity, resistance, beauty and contemplation. This duality reflects a powerful truth: suffering and despair can co-exist with, if not be catalysts for, hopeful futures and calls for unity.

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.