There is something unmistakably sacred about walking into Amna AlBaker’s studio. Not in the religious sense—but in the way that scent, sound, and space can hold room for vulnerability. The air is often perfumed heavily and heavenly with incense. Not to freshen, nor to welcome guests. It is Amna’s own ritual: to cleanse, to claim, and to prepare. In her studio, the act of burning incense becomes a tool, an instrument, a mark-maker. She burns her words into fabric, texts written like smoke: fleeting, ghostly, yet permanent.
Amna’s practice leans into the subtle force of ritual, rupture, and repair. She works in layers—technically, emotionally, and materially—guiding each work through cycles of metamorphosis. These layers are neither sequential nor fixed; they surface, retreat, and resurface again. One gesture may settle for a moment, only to be disrupted by another. A surface, often treated like skin, might bruise, get pierced or absorb. Her process resists the notion of finality—what feels resolved often becomes unsettled. This is where the work lives: in the tension between what is held and what is let go of. Rather than following a premeditative logic, her materials move through a kind of felt thinking—a sensibility shaped by instinct, where memory and matter push each other forward.
Writing, for Amna, is not an afterthought—it is the very spine of her practice, and the place where her work becomes most confrontational. The words that appear in her pieces do not seek literary merit, nor do they function as embellishment. Whether burned into fabric, stitched through it, or diluted into ink, her texts articulate a kind of inner excavation—mapping what had to be survived, sheltered, and what now demands to be released. The language may appear fractured or poetic, but it is deeply intuitive. On paper, on fabric, on skin-like surfaces, her words bleed, stain, disappear, and reappear. Words fall apart mid-thought, obscured by pigment, or articulated in full. In her work, language is not the message; it is the messenger, carrying the weight of the feeling it labours to process and exorcise what has quietly possessed her. And in its release, it lingers. It haunts you.
What emerges now in Amna’s new body of work is a deeper trust in uncertainty. There is a quiet but tangible shift—from working through personal rupture to attending to the aftermath with radical softness. The work does not arrive with resolution, but it does arrive with clarity: not in the form of answers, but more as amendments to what is unresolved. Rather than illustrate pain, she is beginning to locate where it settles. Rather than repair, she is beginning to ask what healing even requires. Her recent gestures feel less like attempts to hold things together and more like invitations to let them come undone. In this unravelling, she carves out space for dilemma, for slowness, for pause.
Through her work, what Amna offers is not narrative, but resonance and texture. Smoke becomes a sentence. Ash becomes a reminder. Gauze becomes a second skin. And in the presence of these fragments, we are reminded that the most meaningful forms of expression are sometimes the least legible. As such, her work does not ask to be read—it asks to be felt.
