g a l l e r y > the artist

Rania Hassan combines knitting and painting to weave sculptural stories about our connections to time, place, and circumstance.

artist statement
We all seek connection, whether it’s how we connect to each other, people who’ve come before us, or those we’ve yet to meet. My artwork is about how we’re all connected, and I show this through materials representing threads connecting us to our pasts and futures.

I create site-specific installations that weave sculptural stories about our connections to time, place, and circumstance. The main themes I work with embody ideas of time, memory, identity, synchronicity, and community, and my greatest inspiration is knitting itself—with one line of thread and the same stitch as every generation that came before, anything is possible. The thread represents our lives, and all the different interpretations and paths we may follow. My work is about levels of interconnectedness. From a single strand of thread, we are all connected.

My installations featuring threads are all knit by hand, often over 40,000 stitches, designed from models and diagrams and spreadsheets and many calculations. Ombré color shifts in these hand knit structures are created through combining threads of copper, stainless steel, silk, linen, and bamboo. These sculptural installations always relate to the settings they’re in—scaling up as spaces grow in size, and adapting materials to compliment their environments.

While my public art sculptures feature materials that extend from fiber to metal, and my kinetic sculptures incorporate rope, the core meaning and focus of my artwork remains on the theme of connection.

bio
Rania Hassan creates site-specific installations that weave sculptural stories about our connections to time, place, and circumstance. The five main themes she works with embody ideas of community, synchronicity, identity, time, and memory. Her work ranges in scale from modular arrangements of 3 x 4 inch drawings to 40 x 40 x 40 foot suspended installations, and materials vary from delicate combinations of the finest threads to plasma cut sheets of rolled steel. Recent projects include Liminality at the Kreeger Museum, a hand knit suspended installation activating the museum’s three level stairwell for the very first time. Marker, a 15 foot tall bright pink sculpture made of steel, has been on view at the highly visible intersection of Connecticut Ave and K Street NW in downtown Washington, DC, since October 2020. Commissioned by the Golden Triangle Business Improvement District and the Smithsonian, Marker represents a beacon for the Smithsonian’s Women’s History Initiative and helps expand their visibility to the streets of DC. Rania’s artwork is in permanent collections and publications world-wide. In 2009, she received a Craft Award of Excellence from the James Renwick Alliance and has been awarded multiple Arts and Humanities Fellowship Program Grant Awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.