Object History
Khulood Al Jabri is UAE artist with a bachelor’s degree from the college of humanities and social sciences, UAE University. She also holds a diploma in business administration from Abu Dhabi University. As a colleague of Dr. Reem Tariq El Mutwalli, they worked together for many years at the Cultural Foundation Abu Dhabi.
This example was created among a handful of others by a group of UAE female artists and donated to the Zay initiative, during an afternoon spent together to celebrate UAE women empowerment at the home of the Zay Initiative’s founder in 2018.
The artists worked together during a four-hour session, each placing her individual design on silk. The fabrics where then collected and a combination (thawb) and (kandurah) gown (thawb_kandurah) was designed out of each artwork to be preserved in the artist’s name within the Zay collection.
Object Features
The artist chose to paint (rasm) her signature abstract yet figurative style using her well-known colour palette of blue, black, purple, yellow and orange. Depicting a female face wearing the face mask (burgu).
The silk fabric was then transformed by Dr. Reem El Mutwalli into the frontal panel of the inner tunic dress (kandurah). Shimmering multi-coloured silk echoing the colours of the artwork was used to finish the inner tunic creating the sleeves and back.
Nude silk tulle (tur) dusted in simmering gold tinsel was used to create the upper overgarment (thawb). To help emphasise the artwork, the traditional UAE neckline shape (bidhah) was simply delineated using one basic outline embroidered in deep metallic blue, attaching the two garments together into one. The same embroidered outline was also applied to the sleeve cuffs (swarah) or (hyul) on the inner tunic dress (kandurah), now acting as lining, and the back was accentuated by a train (thayil).
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