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

artist statement
I am fascinated by the connections we find in our everyday experiences. How do we think of our place in this world? How do we fit in it?

Combining knitting with painting, I create site-specific installations that weave sculptural stories about our connections to time, place, and circumstance. The five main themes I work with embody ideas of community, synchronicity, identity, time, and memory.

This series started because of my fascination with knitting, love for painting, and intrigue in the community of women I instantly found myself connected to around the world. I think about how it links me to my mother, her mother, and all the generations of women who came before them.

My work is about levels of interconnectedness. From a single strand of thread, we are all connected.

bio
Rania Hassan makes installations that combine knitting with painting to weave sculptural stories about our connections to time, place, and circumstance. The five main themes she works with embody ideas of time, memory, identity, synchronicity, and community. Rania’s artwork is included in the permanent collections of the National Institutes of Health (NIH, Bethesda, MD), Amazon Web Services (Herndon, VA), and the District of Columbia’s Art Bank Collection (Washington, DC). Previous solo exhibitions include The Front (New Orleans, LA), Gormley Gallery (Baltimore, MD), and Artisphere (Rosslyn, VA). She has given presentations about her artwork at area Universities (George Mason University, 2014) and Museums (Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, 2019; Textile Museum, Washington, DC, 2012, 2015), and her work has been featured in publications including the Washington Post, Washington City Paper, and Vogue Knitting. In 2009 she received a Craft Award of Excellence from the James Renwick Alliance and has been awarded multiple Artist Fellowship Program Grant Awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.