COLLECTION: Adele Bea Cipste

Adele Bea Cipste (b.1998) is a UAE-based visual artist working primarily in drawing and photography. Her place-focused artworks explore intersections between the natural and the constructed, highlight the affective power of physical environments, and reflect on how spaces act as agents of memory. Through her art practice, she seeks to create an experience for the viewer which would be equivalent to her recollected spatial experience — underpinned by a desire for closeness with a place, and with others through shared looking. She holds a BA in Art Practice and Film Practice from NYU Abu Dhabi (2022).

Artwork statement

A Walk in a Bare Green Field draws on the ongoing rapid urban development of Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi to prompt a contemplation on how physical transformation of the landscape impacts one’s sense of place and wayfinding ability. 

If familiar greenery can be used as wayfinding markers, say, to find a path home after a walk by referring to a distinctive plant silhouette and navigating an environment by drawing on spatial memory, how is the experience of walking altered when one’s surroundings are continuously in flux through construction/reconstruction of new green environments? What are the particularities of the question of what is “indigenous green(ery)” within the UAE’s context, where the construction of green is welcomed through the making of new green neighborhoods? 

The exhibited body of work seeks to create an equivalent experience of walking through Saadiyat Island, as a means of reflecting on these questions. A series of photographs documenting the location’s characteristic soil and plant textures is combined with drawings made in response to these photographs, written observations/insights from the walk, and photographic collages channeling the sense of fragmentation and continuous transformation.