In Manar Mervat al Shouha’s studio overlooking the Liffey, in Dublin, we are looking at a bright canvas – oil paint and pastels – featuring a view of the lobby outside, the river view, her artist’s trolley and a seated figure. “That’s me,” she says and smiles.
The painting is beautiful and hopeful and huge. When Shouha was chosen as an artist-in-residence here at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios she was so eager to get her feelings out that she didn’t wait to get a prestretched canvas but stapled it to the wall directly, reinforcing it with tape.
She’s not sure how she’ll get it out of the studio. She smiles again. “It’s a conversation with the place,” she says. “It’s called Transformations.”
I first wrote about Shouha in 2022, when, because of a backlog in the system, she and other non-Ukrainian asylum seekers were waiting to even be registered.
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She had come to Ireland from Syria and was living in a hotel by a motorway without a residency card or even the €38.80 asylum seekers were then granted each week. She was isolated and alone, painting in her hotel room. At the time she was 27 years old and had very little English – her words were translated by an interpreter provided by the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland, or Masi – but it was clear she had a lot to say.
Lucky Khambule of Masi subsequently invited her to be involved in an exhibition at Rathfarnham Castle. This led to her being offered an artist’s residency at Common Ground in Inchicore. Another supporter, the art auctioneer John de Vere White, got in touch after seeing her story and her art in The Irish Times and has been working with her ever since. “I think she’s a great artist,” he says. “There’s such movement in her work.”
Shouha now has very good English, refugee status, her studio by the river and a record of exhibitions and workshops. She has twice been nominated for the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Hennessy Craig Award and shortlisted for the second round of the Herbert Smith Freehills portrait competition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. She has received the deVere’s Art Award and Contemporary Irish Art Society Award from the RHA.
She is a very talented woman, and because of the war in Syria she is here.
Shouha loved art from a very young age. Her mother, a maths teacher who raised her alone, encouraged her. She eventually found herself at the university in Damascus, where, ultimately, she got a job teaching.
“Before I even spoke I loved colour,” she says. “My mum was very emotional. She loves a lot. So every time she saw me do something, she supported [me]. I loved music. I loved dance. I loved painting.”
Why painting? “I love maths. You know when you try and find numbers, you go into another world? Your mind goes I don’t know where. I also feel that with colour and line. When I went to college I loved sculpture. I wanted to do sculpture. But the line caught me in my heart.”
What painters influenced her? “Unfortunately, we don’t have museums for painting [in Damascus], just museums for old things for history,” she says. “But I remember when I went to college I was obsessed with Egon Schiele, but I really felt something with Picasso.”
There are more paintings in progress in the room. Below one of them is an art book open on a detail from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. “It’s a reply to it,” she says. “If you look at Picasso paintings sometimes it feels like ...” She struggles to find the English words. “You know in maths when you are trying to find a new number?” That’s what it’s like, she says.
[ The personal artwork that Pablo Picasso refused to sell comes to IrelandOpens in new window ]
“Picasso was trying to open a door. He came to this life to open a door. I hope I can open a door. When I’m lonely I look at his art ... It makes me less lonely. I know a lot of people don’t really like his personal life, but I don’t read about his personal life. I look at his paintings. And they are honest and loyal. I hope I can give the world something as useful as he has given.”
She found her two years in a hotel very difficult. She was a lone woman with little English. “When I first arrived in Ireland, it was right at the tail end of the Covid period, so they put us in a hotel for 15 days because of quarantine rules. On the second day I was basically stuck in my room, couldn’t go out or see anyone, and I was just talking to my mum. She told me, ‘Get up and start doing something,’ but I had nothing with me at all.”
Online her mother discovered the Scoop Foundation, which provides grants and support for artists. Katie Prendergast of Scoop brought her art materials. “Art protected me. I put paintings together – the whole room smelled of oil and charcoal.” Shouha’s neighbours there liked the art. They liked to see her work. “They were kind to me. Not all 100 per cent, but I can say 80 per cent. I didn’t socialise. My art was my voice.”
As she worked, Shouha says, “I felt stronger psychologically ... When I came here I had a lot of emotion and anger. I wanted to try and control everything around me. I think I’m in the right place now.”
Shouha’s art is her voice to this day. Her studio is bright and clean (kind of the opposite of the Francis Bacon studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery, across the Liffey). She has notebooks with neat Arabic writing and pencil studies for future paintings. There’s a shelf of art books and a corner where she makes coffee.
On the wall are character sketches of some Syrian political leaders. She is, she says, trying to figure them out. She understands things through drawing and painting them, she says.
Next to the character studies is a powerful, dark painting she calls Reflections of Sin that’s about recent violence in Sweida province. It reminds me a little of Picasso’s painting Guernica. He was also a refugee, she reminds me.
“When I start this one, I don’t know my emotions,” she says. “I don’t know my situation with Syria. After I finish it, I feel it gives me answers ... Always I say the painting comes through me ... I feel it gives me answers and can give answers to a lot of people.”
Shouha was trying not to think of Syria, but then the regime change came at the end of last year. “I felt the emotion of my country again,” she says. “And now I must build that relationship again.”
How does she feel about the changes? “I feel more sadness than hope. It doesn’t feel stable ... When I grew up we had a lot of fusion – Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Druze, Christian, Catholic. I didn’t know we had different types of Muslim until I was 17. Now when I see media or people talking, it’s very racist ... Until I was 17 nobody talked about that.”
A little later she says: “With Assad they were afraid of the government. Now I think they are afraid of each other.”
Shouha points at the painting. “This painting is like a mirror,” she says. “It’s a good way to talk with people” about the war.
The civil war in Syria broke out when Shouha was a teenager. She grew up with the sounds of bombs and was once near one as it exploded. It affected her hearing for days.
Because she’s originally from Daraa, “the cradle of the revolution”, in the south of the country, she was regularly harassed by security forces. She became frightened that she might be jailed for a misunderstood artwork.
Leaving cost a lot of money and took her 3½ months. Coming to Dublin was her mother’s idea. “She said, ‘Small city. It’s not a lot of people. No real dangers.’ She wanted to put me in a bubble. And she read about history. She was very afraid about racists. And she thought Irish people would understand why someone would leave.”
Shouha is shy, but she is beginning to feel at home in Ireland. “I don’t find it so different,” she says. “The feeling of time is similar. When I was in Syria the time was slow. When I went to Lebanon – it’s just two hours between – everything is fast. You feel you are stressed all the time. Here the sense of time reminds me a little of Syria.”
What else? She laughs. “Irish people are indirect.” So are Syrians, she says. “Actually, I personally prefer to be direct.” Later she says, “I grew up with war. Here there’s peace. So maybe it’s not fair to give comparisons. Here sometimes I feel people are more warm. There people are social, but maybe because of war in Syria they are afraid to open up for any person.”
Moving here has changed her. “I was trying to do everything alone. But here, because in the beginning it was hard, it was important to let people help.” People were very kind to her, she says. “I believe in empathy, people caring about each other.”
Shouha is applying for citizenship. She hopes that her mother will be able to travel to be with her eventually. She worries about her. “She is retired. She only leaves the house to get food.”
A few weeks ago someone told Shouha that her work reminded her of Irish art. “I loved when they said that,” she says. “When I came here I put myself in the flow of landscape, faces, people. We make different things in a different culture, a different people ... I open myself to the energy of the place.”
She thinks Irish art must be influencing her. Once, when she was walking through the National Gallery of Ireland, she was struck by a Mary Swanzy painting, Pattern of Rooftops, Czechoslovakia. “The red roofs ... I love her. I feel she didn’t have a place. In the older generation it was just men, so I feel sad about her.”
Shouha says when she paints she hears music in her head: classical music and opera when she wishes to be more controlled, rock music when she wants something wilder. Recently she heard Cormac Begley and his family play traditional music in a pub in Co Kerry; the next day when she painted, she had that sound in her ears. “And in that case the painting was Irish,” she says. “If I ever have a museum I will have music in every room.”
Manar Mervat al Shouha gives a masterclass at the RHA School, in Dublin, on Saturday, November 1st, and Sunday, November 2nd
