We are pleased to welcome Amina Ahmed to FSA’s Artist-in-Residence program in Charleston, SC this Fall (September 26–November 5, 2025). For some three decades, Amina has practiced and explored geometry from various standpoints, particularly as it relates to the natural world. Sensitivity to geometric forms derives in part from the artist’s educational background in Islamic and traditional arts. It informs her belief that patterns, rhythms, and shapes are inherent to life and give structure to physical reality. The universal nature of these patterns has led the artist to consider geometry as a primordial artery linking space, time, and culture. Amina’s artistic practice provides her with a ‘reconnection to the origin,’ her mark-making bearing the influence of ancestors who spanned cultures and ethnicities from Central to South Asia, and Africa.

While employing a range of media and methodologies, Amina continues to return to textile within her practice. Early childhood experiences among women, gathering to sew and quilt, have led her to look deeper into the urges and expressions of making. The forms, shapes, and color observed in these women’s textiles bring a lived quality to the formal technical architecture they reside within. Both in their respective approaches are weft with a shared objective—the axis of their renderings being the beauty presented them in reality. It is through this perspective that Amina’s geometries convey a delicate blend of matrilineal craft practices with spirituality that evoke what is shared amidst cultures, families, persons, memories, as well as what tethers the human and the Divine. Ahmed’s work in recent years has entailed collecting oral histories of making with cotton, weaving, quilting, and natural dyes in India. In Charleston, she aims to collaborate with the local communities to engage with and expand her geometries through further explorations of plants, colors, pigments, and textile traditions that link disparate spaces and speak both to diverse ancestries and long histories of migration.