Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman

Bio

Sarah-Mecca Abdourahman is a graduate of Concordia University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2020). She has been awarded the Salt Spring National Art Prize Joan McConnel Award (2023-24) and is a recipient of the Canada Council of the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council grant (2023). She was a finalist for the Emerging IBPOC Artist Award (2023). She has previously exhibited with FOFA Gallery (2024), Le Livart (2023), Digital Art Resource Centre (2022), Gallery 101 (2022), and the Ottawa Art Gallery (2021). She has also led creative workshops with the Ottawa Art Gallery, Somerset West Community Health Centre, and the Ottawa Catholic School Board (2021-23). Her work is held in various private collections, including the City of Ottawa Art Collection and the Art Volt Collection. Currently, her solo Memories We Carry, Stories We Heal is on view at Warreng G. Flowers Gallery.

Artist Statement

As a first-generation Canadian raised in the suburbs of Ottawa, I have always longed for a connection to my parents’ homelands of Somalia and India. This yearning is woven into the fabric of my mixed-media collaged and painted works. Drawing on Christina Sharpe’s concept of "wake work,” I approach healing as an act of resistance against systems and experiences of oppression such as forced migration and intergenerational trauma. Connecting Sharpe’s work to my own diasporic experiences, I recognize that the aftermath of settler colonialism can create enduring “wakes” that require collective care. I aim to offer space for remembering, mourning, and imagining alternative futures.

My work investigates my distant relationship with my parents’ homelands; I refer to this haunting sentiment as the “second chase”–a diasporic longing for home inspired by Warsan Shire’s poem Home from the line "No one would leave home unless home chased you," which recounts the “chasing” of diasporic communities.

In comparing the “chase” to the experience of a nightmare, I developed a fascination with the dual nature of the bedroom. Bedrooms serve as both havens of rest and the site of nightmares. I see the bedroom as a symbol of tension between comfort and distress, mirroring the haunting/healing conditions of the “second chase.” I insert humour and play as a gesture to my inner child–a therapeutic process that can itself become a path to healing.  My work invites ancestors, family members, and myself to reconnect with the innocence of childhood.

My paintings on blankets signify care and protection, and yet my intuitive painting process is one of destruction, utilizing the ephemeral qualities and stains of thinned-out oil paint to make the blankets appear worn out. This creates the effect of something that is well-worn, akin to a child's cherished possession.

Sharpe, Christina, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Duke UP, 2016

Shire, Warsan, ‘Home,’  Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head: Poems, Random House, 2022, p.18-19.