Sara’s practice has long fallen within a meditative intersection of poetry, aesthetics and memory. For Abdu, poetry is the language to contour interior spaces while experimenting and occupying these spaces with glimpses of hope to map out meanings towards otherworldly dimensions.

Exploring ideas of the unconscious mind with Abdu is to slip between a Freudian view of the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified, pathologized and treated, and a Jungian view of the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.

The absence of hair constitutes doubts, and questions of incompleteness. Abdu created a musical instrument consisting of human hair as strings. She then sonically experimented and improvised using the instrument she designed and graphically illustrated the sound notations on paper. The artist’s diptych soundscapes, I Loved You Once: Soundscape no.1 and Soundscape no.2 attempt to create different environments through which hair is used as a gesture of potential transformation, creation of new memories, identities and reconciliations with the past.

Just as hair holds traces of the past, these works represent time and our desire to outlive the material form. Trapping time within the paper began as a personal and cathartic exercise; an attempt of transferring memories harbored in objects and embodying them onto the plane.

Her laborious and tedious process repeats itself with her new commissioned work for FRIEZE, I Loved You Once: The Unveiled I & II. The work uses collected hair that Sara embroiders into a circle; exploring the cyclical, almost arithmetic nature of her process. Using naturally shed hair; Abdu’s memories unveil themselves as she picks at fabrics in time. Weaving through her recollections as she uncovers versions of an everchanging self.