Shifting Patterns is part of Filwa Nazer’s latest exhibition The Housed Body, where she moves between diagrammed surfaces and three-dimensional forms. The work shifts between the visuals of representation and the viscerality of corporality, drawing viewers further into these unsettled negotiations. In this work, Nazer expands her practice further into embodied space. Suspended from the ceiling, these forms may echo some of her previous sculptural installations; however, they mark a distinctly more uncanny feeling. These suspended pieces twirl and stretch, their combinations of materials suggesting both comfort and protection while straddling disfigurement.

Compositionally, the piece is constructed from pink padded fabric supported by green polyethylene netting. This material pairing gives the work its movement and for: the green netting, commonly used on construction sites, offers both structural support and symbolic meaning. For Nazer, it signifies protection, transition, and the unfinished. It is a language of something in flux, under construction, and in process.

The pink fabric itself indicates a personal fragment. Cut from a dress pattern that no longer fits the artist, it becomes a metaphor for change, tension, and emotional negotiation. The piece is divided into three distinct sections, each conveying different emotional states. The first piece, stretched outward like arms, holds a sense of struggle and a tension of being pulled in multiple directions: between past and present, memory and awareness. It speaks to the discomfort of transition.

The second piece, bending toward the ground, expresses surrender, capturing a moment of release, letting go, yielding to what is no longer within control. The third piece, which resembles a skirt, is precise and still. Its stillness has its own tension, an almost stoic repetition. Though seemingly composed, the lines remain imperfect, denoting the asymmetry of the original dress pattern and the body itself. Across this intuitively arranged installation, there is a tension between seeking perfection and accepting imperfection. The unresolved asymmetry, the extended seams, and the visible structure beneath, all embrace vulnerability and incompleteness.