I was approached by a gallery in the United States to create something for their booth at Design Miami. At the time, I was in Lebanon and my mother had become very ill. It was a difficult period for our family, but it also brought me and my siblings much closer. We were speaking constantly, and I wanted to make something about that closeness and what we were going through together.

That naturally brought me back to an earlier work, Running Around Mother Happy, which I created in 2022 following my research at the V&A. The piece explores childhood and the belief around protecting children from the evil eye — for example, by dressing them in black or putting black around their eyes to deter it. That is why the work is black, with these large braids and a more playful weave. But it was also very personal: I made it thinking about my mother, and the title comes from a line in an Arabic lullaby she used to sing to us as children.

So And They Stay Together Happy became a continuation of that work and, in a way, another ode to my mother, but this time my siblings became part of the story too. There are three pieces because there are three of us. Together, we are one, but we can also exist independently — while still continuing one another.

— Nour Hage

Matrescence describes the physical, emotional and mental transformation a woman goes through when she becomes a mother. There is increasing scientific understanding that it goes far beyond hormonal changes — the way you think, feel and behave shifts too, particularly during those first years when so much of your attention becomes focused on your child.

This was the first piece I created after giving birth to my son. A gallery in the United States approached me for an exhibition when he was only two or three months old, and I remember telling them, 'I'm going to start, but I have no idea what is going to come out of this because my mind is everywhere.' It also took me longer to finish than any other piece I had made.

I used a mixture of fabrics left over from previous projects and new materials because I wanted the work to contain both versions of myself: bits of who I had been before and bits of this new person I was becoming.

There are also very physical traces of that period in the materials. The goldish-brown fabric was originally white, and I dyed it using an iron bath I made with rusty nails I found when we moved into our house in Dubai. I liked the idea of literally bringing something from the house where I became a mother into the work.

I connected the strips of fabric using medical sutures — the same type used after I gave birth. I discovered afterwards that I had a hypersensitivity to them and wasn't healing properly. There was something quite striking about discovering that my body was hypersensitive to a thread when my own practice revolves so much around threads, so I wanted those sutures to become part of the piece too.

— Nour Hage

When I started working on the project, I decided to go right back to the beginning of that period, to the reign of Elizabeth I. I have always been fascinated by her and what she represented, so I started researching what was happening in England when she became queen.

One of the things I became interested in was England's relationship with Europe at the time. England was Protestant while much of Europe was Catholic, which created political and religious tensions. SO Elizabeth I began looking beyond Europe for trade relationships and established trade with the Ottoman Empire, which was quite radical at the time because trading with a non-Christian power was not considered conventional.

From there, I became interested in the goods that were reaching England through this trade and where they were coming from. That naturally led me to the wider trade routes of the Silk Road, through which materials and spices travelled from South Asia into the Ottoman Empire and eventually reached England. Two things that particularly interested me were indigo and turmeric, because both could be used as natural dyes.

At the same time, I was studying portraits of English aristocracy and nobility from Elizabeth I's reign, and I noticed something quite funny: as England became wealthier, the ruffs around people's necks seemed to become bigger and more extravagant. So I took that visual detail and exaggerated it, creating this enormous ruff from silk organza and linen, with the fabrics dyed using indigo and turmeric.

Sultana Isabel is very research-based and, for me, there isn't really an emotional element to it, though I still love it a lot.

— Nour Hage

It actually started during the pandemic. At some point, I couldn't access my studio, so I began thinking about what I could make without needing to physically be there. There was a lot of conversation around NFTs and digital art at the time, and I already had the technical skills from my university days, so I thought, why not experiment with it?

I ended up really loving the process. It gave me this very playful space where I could experiment quite freely, but I also wanted to use it to make something that was very dear to me. That is how I came to create these portraits of my grandmother throughout different stages of her life.

What made them particularly personal was that I used items of clothing she had given me. I would photograph the clothes, zoom in on the fabrics and then digitally manipulate those textures to recreate portraits of her. So even though the work was digital, there was still this very physical and personal connection to fabric running through it.

— Nour Hage