Remains III

Everything changed when Soulaf Abas (Soully) returned to Damascus to visit her family in the summer of 2012, a year after the Arab Spring revolution began. She states: “I found that what used to be my playground had been reduced to a pile of rubble, with bloodstains everywhere. The smell of gunpowder filled the air of Damascus for weeks at a time. Friends would talk about the smell of burning flesh coming from certain neighborhoods. The visit completely changed my perspective and my sense of what home means. It was life-changing in terms of how my surroundings had changed and how many people I had lost.”

“Upon my return from Syria, I started creating images in painting and printmaking that depicted what I experienced. For the first time in years, my subject and my process were working together in such harmony that I finally began to understand how far painting can be pushed in terms of process and concept, and how healing it can be.”

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