From Journal to Jewelry, the ARDH124 Journey
Gestation
In the spring of 2018, I got myself a new jourrnal and dedicated it for drafting a plan for a new personal art project for the future. The future wasn't so clear then, but the present was entangled with commitments and engagements with my small family of three, and the business that I had built around that.
Background
Ten years prior to that, I had been on a mission to rise from years of slumber in depression, caused by the loss of both my parents as a teenager, and an abusive early marriage. I had committed myself to become a better person so I can be a better mother for my daughter whom I was parenting on my own at the time. In the year that followed, I met a very special person who became a dear friend, then my lover, my partner, and husband. What should've been the start of something blissful and beautiful, became a magnet to a lot of chaos in my life. I was fought, judged, attacked, and punished by my ex husband, relatives, and friends. Instead of growing slowly and gracefully now that my family was complete once again, and my heart started to heal, I had to do things frantically, drastically, and desperately, so I could sustain us and protect our sacred loving union. To say that these events wrecked havoc on my mental health would be an understatement, but work was a savior, and kept me going, one way or another.
A Jewelry Making Career
The very start of my jewelry making journey happened in the autumn of 2008, when I began tinkering with beads and findings for the very first time. It was a desperate attempt to make something out of myself, and to try and transform the grief, having already wasted many years of my life up until then. I began as a jewelry and craft hobbyist, then became a regular and consistent art fairs seller. After that, I started participating in big events and exhibitions, and at a later stage, I expanded to the wholesale territory, by then having hired and trained an assistant to help me with the mass production. The road lead me eventually to teaching jewelry making, I became an instructor. I ran workshops and gave private classes for few years, instructing people from all walks of life, different ages, fields of experience, and backgrounds. I taught in very straightforward and simple ways what I had learned myself the very hard way. By that stage, my work got recognition, I was featured and highlighted in the media for a good while. What came after that milestone was the start of my international online jewelry business. From there on, I got invested in growing that business solely, which expanded exponentially within few short years. At the beginning, I was selling my own designs and creations which I had been so eagerly sketching and crafting at home and in between teaching and mothering. Soon I found myself filling a niche for the high demand for Arabic calligraphy jewelry in the overseas market, after having unintentionally made and sold few Arabic lettering pieces. I had set for myself and the business a very high standard in craftsmanship and customer service, which became the reason for my growing loyal clientele worldwide.
Survival
On the outside, everything was going flawlessly and smoothly in my life. On the inside, I was troubled with stagnation and numbing. I had been functioning like a machine for the last five consecutive years with hardly any break to mention. I had settled for being a successful entrepreneur, a committed mother, and a dedicated wife for so long that I had ceased to exist outside of these contexts. In order to connect with myself again, I knew I had to allow my artistic and creative side to come out and play. I thought I would begin by imagining a scenario, for a certain project, that may or may never materialize. That project was to come from my heart with the only purpose of filling it with joy, and making me feel alive again. Dreaming was to give me hope, and I trusted hope to lead me where I needed to be.
From Concept to Plan
Drafting a plan for something that was totally un-needed, was exactly what was needed. I needed to bring to my life again the concept of art for the sake of art itself, and creativity for the sake of self expression, merely. I sat one afternoon on the doorstep to my terrace out-looking the Beirut cityscape, and I started to jot down notes on that journal, and so ARDH was birthed.
ARDH124 was the call of my soul nudging me through the entanglements of the structural society, the survival systems, the intricate relationship ties, the pressing needs for existing the way the so called modern life has imposed. All I needed to do to heed the call was to give myself the tiniest space possible, and squeezing in the littlest of time. I created that space in that very journal, filling a page or two whenever I managed.
Within few months from that day, my life was to be changed upside down all over again, and I had to let go of a lot of things and so many people before the year ended, including my second marriage.
From that moment on, the journal was put aside to gather dust for another long while, as the priorities have shifted once again due to the recent changes.
From Plan to Reality
A year later and just before the revolution mess started in Lebanon, and only few months before the whole Corona and lockdown chaos began, I lost my business for logistics reasons. In the Autumn of 2019, I leaned into the ARDH124 draft, and made it the blue print for a new alternative source of income for the near future. The long days trapped inside with uncertainty and worry were used to start working on the sketching and making of the first jewelry collection - which proved to be very challenging; I did not have confidence in it or in myself anymore, I was still dealing with the aftermath of the end of my second marriage, a move, a most unsatisfied adolescent child, the loss of my business, the drastic changes occurring in our country and the world, and another round of upheavals with my deeply deranged first ex husband.
An Interrupted Launch
When I did eventually manage to have the first pieces of the initial collection ready, the time was simply not right. Who by springtime 2020 was ready for art, exhibitions, or local markets of any sort!? The Lebanese market in particular has suffered the most, especially as the banking system and the currency were collapsing around the same time as the world restrictions and lockdown madness were happening.
Eventually, I had to put ARDH aside once again, and focused on finding a way to revive and keep the business going somehow. There has been constantly numeral complications and setbacks, I battled through them all incessantly, the most hardest one was the Beirut Port explosion is summer 2020. By that point, I had lost all hope for the latest ARDH plan. I had to move apartments once again, it was my second one in less than 3 months, and I focused my time and energy solely on keeping the business afloat. I kept it and it kept me going for the next 2 years that followed.
A Flimsy Comeback
In the Autumn of 2022, I had decided that 2023 was to be dedicated to ARDH124. I had lost so much and so many people in the recent years that I knew I could only base my next step in life on a solid foundation. Heart and soul were it, and so ARDH had to be given the proper time and dedication that it deserved. I made a good expansion plan at the start of the year, I started off right, and the creative juices were flowing. I gave exposure to the pieces, I finished some old ones, I made many new ones, and I sold several ones.
Unfortunately all of that came to halt by mid summer, as I was hindered with several nervous breakdowns and severe mental turmoil, as I battled through new cataclysmic changes in my family and personal life, and yet another major move.
Currently
The amount of pain I go through on a daily basis lately - mental, emotional, and physical - is crippling my very move, and stopping me from being able to function normally, let alone get creative. However, I keep trying, each day I write out - and stick to - small realistic actions to bring me back slowly to ARDH, to make feel connected again, to remind me of the dream, the playing, the floating around in a world of endless potential of self expression and creativity. I allocate the time daily, I give myself the space, and I sit with myself, allowing my hands to create and make. Sometimes things flow effortlessly, but most of the time, I freeze. Still, I don't quit or give up. There's nothing left to give to or get from but ARDH now... my own voice, my vision, my faith and hope.
What is ARDH
ARHD124 is my tool for survival. This isn't a space for luxurious musings and fanciful creations. I create to preserve my soul. I create to keep my troubled mind going. I create to heal my achy heart. I create to keep my body moving. I create to stay relevant.
This isn't a brand or a trend, it's not a product or a merchandise, it is my forging together years of experimenting with, learning about, and teaching different methods and uses of different materials, along with the remembering of the free childlike play inside of me, to try and come up with something that speaks of me; my pains, my joys, my longings, but also the telling of this most intricate Earthly human existence.
ARDH is the landing ground that catches, it is the fertile soil that sustains, it is Earth, it is a (temporary) Home...
ARDH is أرض is Earth is إرث is inheritence...
Spring 2018 - Dora.
Autumn 2019 - Dekwaneh.
Winter 2019 - Dekwaneh.
few of the first finished brass pieces.
graphic designer used to generate the first official logo.
January 2020 - Dewkaneh.
Spring 2020 - Dekwaneh.
January 2021 - Fanar.
and breaking away briefly from paisley.
and shapes I am fascinated with, and a return to the initial ARDH124 blueprint and vision.
and so another cycle begins.
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