From a Desolate Place, the Lights Come On

The base of Nyx is black. Not as a formal choice, not as a nod to any movement or school, but because the work began, as Deeride described it, in a period of depression and a loss of identity. Over that black ground, she pressed coloured foil into custom texture paste, building up the surface until light seemed to break through from underneath. The piece is currently listed on Mondoir alongside Vivid, which follows the same logic: darkness first, then something that looks, from a distance, almost like the sky cracking open. Both works are from 2025, made with textured plaster, acrylic, and coloured foil on canvas, and both belong to the Northern Lights collection — a body of work that takes its emotional structure directly from a trip Deeride made to see the Aurora Borealis in person. The foil in each piece is not decorative. It is the point. Pressed into the paste before it sets, it catches light at angles that shift as you move, so the same canvas looks different in the morning than it does at night, different under gallery lighting than under daylight. She is making work about states that change, and she has found a material that performs exactly that instability.

Deeride is a self-taught mixed-media artist based in Dubai. She has been making work since childhood and has been selling and exhibiting professionally since 2023. In the two years since, she has moved from group shows to a solo exhibition at BOCA in DIFC, where she presented her full Northern Lights collection alongside a series she calls the Broken Minis. The pace has been fast, and the work has kept up with it.

Her materials are acrylic paint, coloured foil, and a texture paste she custom-makes herself, which she builds up on canvas using a scraping tool to cut notches and grooves into the surface before it sets. The result is work that reads differently depending on how close you stand. From across a room, the foil catches light and the colours read as atmospheric, almost geological. Up close, the surface is worked and physical, full of marks that record the pressure of the tool and the direction of the artist's hand.

When I asked what texture paste lets her do that flat paint does not, she said it was about building rather than depicting. "The process of creating the notches on the canvas is a moment when I get to disassociate from everything and just feel my emotions as I scrape through." She described using art to manage her own mental health, and said she hoped viewers could recognise in the work "the overwhelming feeling of needing to be held, needing to find hope, needing to feel appreciated." It is a lot to ask of acrylic and foil, but the works she was describing — particularly the Northern Lights series — are built precisely to carry that weight.

The Aurora Borealis trip was not a holiday. She travelled specifically to see the lights, which meant going somewhere remote, cold, and dark. The experience of waiting in that landscape, and then watching the sky change, became the conceptual engine for a whole body of work. "You go through this really dark moment in your life, and then all the bright coloured foil — it's metaphorical," she said, describing Nyx and Vivid in terms of that same arc: low to high, black to colour, absence to presence. The Northern Lights, she added, "revive your spirit in a way that only nature can."

That is the kind of statement that can sound like marketing copy, but in context it reads differently. Deeride is not talking about nature as a vague source of inspiration. She has sought it out deliberately and at some cost — volcanoes, mountains, oceans, the Arctic dark — and she is specific about what each landscape gave her. The desert of Dubai, where she was raised, she described not in terms of colour or light but in terms of scale and silence. Her travels take her somewhere else entirely: to conditions that are uncomfortable, sometimes extreme, and that produce a different kind of looking. She said she has done trips specifically to encounter a different kind of nature to the one available in Dubai, and that volcanoes, northern lights, mountains, and oceans have each fed directly into paintings and collections.

Dubai itself shapes her work in a different register. She was clear on this. The city's desert is part of her background, but it is the architecture that she returns to when she talks about how the place informs her practice. The texture paste, the building up of layers, the structural quality of the surface — she connects all of it to the construction she sees around her. "Dubai inspires me to be innovative, to be building, to be creating all the time," she said. It is a practical observation as much as an aesthetic one. She grew up watching a city assemble itself, and that habit of accumulation is visible in how she works.

Her education was informal and self-directed. She attended workshops with Sosonka Arts and has been candid about how much she learned from YouTube tutorials and social media, which gave her room to experiment without the pressure of a formal curriculum. What she took from that process was freedom to fail without consequence — to try a technique, discard it, and try another without anyone grading the outcome. The texture paste method in particular seems to have developed through sustained trial and error into something she now controls precisely, even when the emotional content it carries is anything but controlled.

In March 2025, Luminous and Vivid appeared in a Women's Day exhibition curated by Noor Royal Gallery in Jumeirah. A month later, five works — Oceanic Route, Worthy, Vivid, Iridescent, and Luminious — were shown at World Art Dubai under the Artezaar umbrella, one of the fair's larger curatorial partners. The solo show at BOCA in DIFC in September 2025 was the most substantial outing so far: the complete Northern Lights collection, plus the Broken Minis series, shown together for the first time. Deeride said less about the Broken Minis in our conversation than about the Northern Lights work, but the name implies something fragmented and deliberately incomplete, which sits in interesting tension with the structural, building-up quality of her usual process. Whether the series represents a formal departure or a different application of the same method is something the BOCA show would have answered for anyone who saw it. In November, a single work, Feline, appeared at The Junction on Al Serkal Avenue, curated by Art Society. The range of contexts across that year — commercial fair, DIFC gallery, curated group exhibition, solo show — suggests an artist testing different rooms rather than settling into one.

Earlier in 2025, Deeride also showed work in a Color and Glitter exhibition at Dusit Thani with Art Society, and in a presentation called Story in Turquoise, also with Art Society. The volume of activity across a single calendar year is notable for someone two years into a professional practice, and it points to a deliberate strategy of visibility: showing in as many contexts as possible, with different works, to different audiences, before consolidating around a single gallery relationship.

The works currently on Mondoir — Skylure, Nyx, Aura, Iridescent, Luminious — are all from 2025. They share a quality of compressed energy, surfaces that look like they are holding something in. Skylure and Aura lean toward the cosmic end of her range: the foil reads as starfield or atmosphere, the texture as planetary surface. Iridescent sits closer to the oceanic work she showed at World Art Dubai, the colour shifting between green and gold depending on the angle of light. Across all of them, the custom texture paste gives the surface a topographical quality — you read it the way you might read a landscape from altitude, looking for the logic of the terrain.

She has an invitation to show at Satellite on Al Serkal Avenue in 2026. Al Serkal is Dubai's main arts district, and Satellite is one of its more closely watched venues. It is a meaningful step, and it suggests that the pace of the last year is not slowing down.

"Both artworks are a metaphorical path for me and it's also a bit of a love note to the Northern Lights and the power of nature to restore us," she said, speaking about Nyx and Vivid near the end of our conversation. "I think the Aurora Borealis is such a unique and amazing phenomenon to experience. I highly recommend everyone to take an opportunity to go see them. It revives your spirit in a way that only nature can."

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