Rania Hassan
Rania Hassan combines knitting and painting to weave sculptural stories about our connections to time, place, and circumstance. While our memories change each time they are recalled, in looking back we can see things more clearly. UNRAVEL is about how we often have to take things apart to put them back together.
In knitting, unraveling is about correcting an error, or starting over.There is a vulnerability in letting things fall apart, and a revelation in seeing the new forms reassembled. Our experiences are so interconnected and overlaid that sometimes we only remember beginnings and endings, leaving the middles feeling hazy like clouds. Everything changes us, and every memory recalled is transformed by what we know now.
UNRAVEL was made from discarded elements of previous artworks and installations. Details drawn over and over—similar to how knitting involves patterns of the same stitch—are woven together again to take on new life.This repetition elucidates how memories aren’t solitary, they exist because they are indelibly intertwined with past and present and involved in a perpetual cycle of creation, deconstruction, and regeneration.
Rania’s artwork is included in the permanent collections of the National Institutes of Health (NIH, Bethesda, MD), Amazon Web Services (Herndon, VA), and the District of Columbia’s Art Bank Collection (Washington, DC). Previous solo exhibitions include The Front (New Orleans, LA), Gormley Gallery (Baltimore, MD), and Artisphere (Rosslyn, VA). Her work has been featured in publications including the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, and Vogue Knitting. In 2009 she received a Craft Award of Excellence from the James Renwick Alliance and has been awarded multiple grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
