Aurelia Butler

Images courtesy of Cyrah Dardas, Shana Merola, Na Forrest Lim, Library Street Collective, and CCS gallery, shared with permission

Reconnecting with the Earth, Cyrah Dardas Collages Paintings with Handmade Pigments

February 24, 2025

ArtNature

Kate Mothes

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From oxidized metals, foraged plants, and botanical inks and dyes, Cyrah Dardas derives colors and textures from materials found in the earth. Based in Detroit, the artist reflects the juxtapositions of her surrounding landscape in paintings on cotton paper, merging human-made and organic materials in works redolent of Persian tapestries.

In abstract compositions evocative of Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensual flower forms or the symbol-rich paintings of Hilma af Klint vis-à-vis the spiritualist movement, Dardas collages paper painted with handmade watercolors and quilts textiles with hand-dyed fabrics.

“For the last few years, I have been thinking a lot about belonging and seeking to understand it through a more loving relationship to place,” she tells Colossal. “All of my work as an artist flows from this seeking.”

Dardas employs the language of abstraction to explore the human psyche and the “patterns, behaviors, forms, colors, and movements I see in the living world,” she says. Recently, she’s been considering the impact of humans seeing ourselves as increasingly separate from both nature and one another, simultaneously fascinated and grieved by the fallacy of individualism—the confusion between the freedom to make good decisions and the perceived right to do whatever we want with no empathy or regard for how it will affect others.

“In my practice, I ask myself, could I possibly foster some level of reciprocity with any—or all—of the many elements and beings that have brought me here and taken care of me?” Dardas says. “In order to do that, I know I need to at least find a way to connect to them differently than the models that modernity offers us. Art is my portal for that, a different type of connection.”

Dardas invokes ancient, ancestral ways of being in the world by consciously connecting to her natural surroundings. She honors ecosystems and relationships that are naturally cooperative, nourishing, and sustaining, drawing contrasts between processes she views as extractive, like capitalism, patriarchal attitudes, or over-reliance on technology. She uses locally available materials and relies on analog techniques to prepare and process them.

Describing herself as a “queer, eco-romantic artist and care worker,” Dardas examines the nuances of interdependency, growth, and life cycles. Much of her recent work is a reflection of her own pregnancy as she is currently in the “fleeting baby phase” of new parenthood. She says:

I got curious about other beings that swell and gorge to create life—all the plant bodies of water holding seeds, feeding and nurturing them. I wanted to mirror them, thinking of myself as a gourd, a seed pod, a fruit. Like the many facets and expressions of queerness, I felt the experience of pregnancy was vast and delightfully undefinable, and I wanted to translate that feeling or mirroring into something visual.

Dardas’s work is on view in the group exhibition Warp and Weft: Technologies within Textiles, presented by Library Street Collective at The Shepherd in Detroit, which continues through May 3. Find more on her website and Instagram.

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