Suhaylah Hamid

Artist Profile

Suhaylah Hamid (b. 1993, UK. Lives and works in Ely, Cambridgeshire.

Suhaylah Hamid makes paintings and drawings of imagined landscapes in which natural forms turn into one another. Working mainly in oil pastel and oil, alongside ink, watercolour, gouache, acrylic and pencil on paper, she often begins from scenes in her dreams and from the notes, sketches, sound recordings and objects she gathers while walking.

Trees, pools, rocks, waterfalls, rivers, swamps and valleys recur throughout the work, with bird-like shapes and spectral figures moving among them. Trees hang down and become pools of water, and rocks sit above reflections more defined than the rocks themselves. She uses the density and immediacy of oil pastel to build fluid, layered surfaces in saturated colour. Most works are intimate in scale, from oil paintings such as Dancers (2022), 30 x 24 cm, to works on paper of up to 59 x 42 cm. In 2024 she made Night at the Fountain, a limited edition print for the Victoria and Albert Museum, which reworks the central fountain motif of the museum’s tiled Poynter Room as a night scene with ghostly birds and dense planting, framed by small painted tiles.

Hamid, who exhibits as Suhaylah H., is self-taught as an artist. She graduated from King’s College London with a BA in Liberal Arts, majoring in Environmental Geography, in 2017, and an MA in Comparative Literature in 2019. Her first solo exhibition, Apparitions, with Brushes With Greatness, London (2022), concluded a series of oil-based drawings and paintings and included a musical composition and abstract film by the artist. It was followed by Haunted by the Dream at Pilgrim’s Contemporary (2023) and The Spell, The Plot & The Ether with Brushes With Greatness, London (2023). Her work has also been shown in group exhibitions in London, including Naturalcultural Nights II (2024).

Her work is held in the collection of the Corridor Foundation, Hong Kong.