Nets

The series Nets (2019) and The Trouble with Lichen (2019) are materially and culturally specific to Fogo Island, inspired by the surprising and metamorphic landscape of Fogo, and developing out of conversations and collaborations with local craftspeople and community members. Dawood collaborated closely with Sheila Payne, Margaret Freake, and Lillian Dwyer, who worked with wool, crochet and embroidery to create the segments in Nets and the fibrous texture of something growing and alive on the rock-like monochromes and painted colour-fields by Dawood in The Trouble with Lichen.

The Nets series (2020) reflect on conversations with local fisherman and historian: Kevin Decker, as to the development and innovation made with the Newfoundland cod trap: a device so successful it hastened the moratorium, which resulted in the collapse of the cod trade. This link between social history and the practical imperative to bring home a bigger catch, intersects with Dawood’s thinking around land and sea, and their relation not just in a social sense, but a his- torical, literary and even metaphysical one. These works in their delicate mining of local craft histories (such as rug hooking), play with the picture plane as a way to elide these possibilities and where they might sit, somewhere between taking a walk and going out on a boat, and where an aerial view intersects with a landscape, or portrait presentation. Or for that matter where the landscape is reduced to trail or grid, and the absences are as poignant as the filled areas.