Patricia Millns: ‘The basic principles of Islamic art are what inform my practice’

Patricia Millns describes her work as an extension of herself. When you walk into her light and airy studio in Dubai Marina, the statement rings true in more ways than one.

Millns’s art, mostly characterised by minimalist sculptures that she describes as objects and textile-based works in whites or greys, is echoed in the clean surfaces, white walls and white furniture in the uncluttered space.

Having lived and worked in the Gulf region for more than 30 years, the 65-year-old artist – petite, charmingly affable and a self-confessed fan of the Japanese designer Issey Miyake – is something of an institution within the regional art scene.

Her new series Silent Books, a sequence of encased books with feathers fluttering among the pages, will go on show today when the Emirates Fine Art Society's 33rd annual exhibition opens. Millns is also collaborating with a master glass-blower from the Czech company Lasvit – internationally known for its bespoke light fittings and glass sculptures – on a large public art installation that will be unveiled at the opening of Dubai Design District (d3) on April 2.

“Working with this material will be a new challenge for me,” says Millns of the planned floor sculpture, which will resemble a deconstructed Arab necklace. “I will use the blown-glass sections to express a philosophical concept on the subject of adornment. Glass composed of silica, sand, is the ideal medium for my work, as its transparency reflects and refracts light to add substance to my adornment concept.”

The adornment or beautification of women is something that Millns has been fascinated with for decades. The subject caught her interest in the 1980s when she moved from her native United Kingdom to Kuwait. She says she was drawn to the region after completing a master’s degree in art history, where, in the course of reading about the medieval period, she realised that many of the things she had assumed to be European (science, mathematics, writing, irrigation, medicine, travel and exploration) had originated in the Arab world.

“I have always questioned everything and so I had to come to the region to learn more,” she says. “Kuwait was so wonderful, so welcoming. The intellectual conversations and understanding of art was like nothing I had ever known. For the first time in my life I was in the company of women and I found the world of the women so fascinating. I didn’t realise how much I was going to learn from their strength and their knowledge.”

Millns fell in love with the region and its culture and began practising her art and teaching miniature painting at one of Kuwait’s Islamic art museums. During her time there, she describes one other discovery that was to greatly affect her life and art: “In Kuwait, I also learnt to appreciate fragrance; the understanding of an olfactory art form, which I hadn’t experienced in the West.”

Millns left Kuwait when the Gulf War broke out in 1991, relocating to Oman and dividing her time between there and the UAE ever since. But the lessons she learnt in Kuwait stayed with her. Fragrance has often permeated her artworks, being used within the folds of her fabrics and to trigger emotions, but its use was something she extended to more conceptual levels.

“For me, the starting point for art is a basic idea that is first realised internally before being expressed externally. The viewer makes the art piece come alive but that isn’t the reason you are doing it; it begins with something you are doing for yourself and fragrance is like that.

“Fragrance is also about giving,” she says. “In Arabia, the hospitality of the culture overwhelmed me, because it is done so naturally. To me, the fragrance of roses, perfume, coffee and cooking represent the things that you are giving to somebody; the things people give so naturally and generously.”

On a round table in a corner of her studio sits Circle – a large, site-specific installation that she made by pulling together thousands of disc-shaped paper coffee filters to resemble a snake-like sculpture for an exhibition at Sharjah Art Museum in 2013. The piece exemplifies her words: it is made from a material representing coffee, the sheer abundance of material expresses the act of giving; and it adds another layer that is seen in almost every artwork she works on – multiplicity.

Whether it’s coffee-filter papers sewed together in a chain, tea bags linked to form small necklaces, or 500 ghutras she hung at the entrance to the first edition of Art Dubai (then known as the Gulf Art Fair) in 2007, she uses recurring imagery or objects in her works.

“The basic principles of Islamic art are what inform my practice,” she says. “Everything I make is either thousands and hundreds of pieces and the more you have, the more the surface disappears and so does the individual. The surface is an illusion; it is what is behind the surface that interests me. When I am creating them, I am also in a meditative space and the viewer – if they really look at it – can be, too.”

One of the most interesting projects she has worked on was in 2013 for the Tashkeel exhibition Emra'a Adornment. The installation consists of a series of niqabs made in ethereal white and suspended from the ceiling with long ties cascading to the floor. She adorned each with small beads made from paper torn from fashion magazines and embroidered them with thoughts and comments obtained from women she interviewed. Richly layered and elegantly presented, the project captures all the elements of her practice: love and respect for the region, an abiding interest in fashion and textiles, and a spiritual connection that transcends language and culture.

Before I leave, I ask Millns – who was recently elected as a fellow at the Royal Society of Arts in London – to share the biggest highlight of her decades-long career.

She replies without hesitation: “For me it is always the next project. I don’t look back; I look forward at the possibilities. My next project is what makes me come home and start working again and I always love a challenge.”

• Silent Books by Patricia Millns is part of Emirates Fine Art Society’s annual exhibition, which runs at Sharjah Art Museum from Tuesday, March 10, until April 8. For more information, visit www.patriciamillns.com

aseaman@thenational.ae