Exploring how we construct and celebrate beauty as women of colour
Participants: BAME women
Lead artist (s): Hanan Issa
Location: Cardiff
Further info: Skin Deep will be a series of cross-discipline poetry/ visual art workshops focusing on body image and beauty, particularly from a BAME woman’s perspective. This will include exploring themes such as colourism, body hair, face structure, body shape as well as unpacking more general constructs of beauty. The project will invite participants to compose a self-portrait and will then be followed by a poetry workshop enriched by their artwork and self-exploration. It will culminate in a body of work surrounding the themes of beauty and body image from a BAME perspective
About Hanan Issa: Hanan is a Welsh-Iraqi poet and writer. She has been featured on both ITV Wales and BBC Radio Wales and worked in partnership with National Museum Wales, Artes Mundi, Warwick university, Swansea Fringe, StAnza festival, Wales Arts International and Seren Books. Her work has been published in Banat Collective, Hedgehog Press, Wales Arts Review, Sukoon mag, 4 Journal, Poetry Wales, Parthian, Y Stamp, sister-hood magazine and MuslimGirl.com. Her winning monologue was featured at Bush Theatre’s Hijabi Monologues. She is the co-founder of Wales’ first BAME open mic series ‘Where I’m Coming From’. She was a 2018-2019 Hay Festival Writer at Work. Her debut poetry pamphlet My Body Can House Two Hearts was published by BurningEye Books in October 2019.
Artist’s quote:
“The Skin Deep project aims to peel back the layers of myth told about beauty, to re-examine who defines beauty, and to give ourselves, as women, the permission to celebrate the beauty we discover within ourselves.”