Habib Hajallie: Black & Blue

This body of work, titled ‘Black & Blue’, is shaped by grief, trauma and loss. Across the series, I use self-portraiture to visualise nuanced and often indescribable emotional states that sit beneath language; disorientation, dread, absence, and the destabilising process of trying to rebuild meaning. The blue ballpoint pen drawings were started after the devastating stillbirth of my daughter, Sadie. These works offer a raw and unfiltered glimpse into the most painful time in my life and in the life of my wife, Katie. As the series progressed, the act of sitting with these painful and complex emotions of loss brought up unresolved feelings of grief from losing my sister, Bee, in 2022.

Making this work felt truly urgent for me. My practice has always reflected the circumstances of my life at the specific moment where the work is created. With this body of work, I have literally forced myself to sit quietly with thoughts and emotions that I struggled to confront. These works therefore function as a kind of visual diary, made from within that experience, using drawing to articulate thoughts and emotions where words are inadequate. Drawing has been a space of solace and catharsis since childhood. However unsettling or emotionally loaded the process has been, each artwork, and the over 1000 cumulative hours spent mark making across the series, has been an invaluable step towards healing.

Many of the works are surreal imagined scenes, offering a glimpse into a reality that has felt unspeakable as I have tried to rebuild some sense of meaning after profound loss. I use portraiture to depict this altered sense of self. The deliberate shift to blue ballpoint in many of the works was a means of expressing that fragility and vulnerability present within the scenes depicted.

‘Folktales of Prudence’, the only black pen drawing in the exhibition, was made between the two most profound losses of my life. Inspired by Titian’s ‘Allegory of Prudence’ (c1550-65), this work investigates what it means to live a truly good life, depicting three stages of metamorphosis as outlined in Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ (1883). This drawing feels important because it sits at the intersection of profound pain and existential self-exploration.

The ‘Black & Blue’ series is concerned with the internal landscape of loss, but also with what it means to keep going when reality has been fundamentally altered. By drawing directly onto antique texts, I place personal pain into a wider conversation with philosophical structures of meaning, not to resolve that tension, but to truly sit with that unease.

As a man, specifically as a man of colour, it feels important for me to show this vulnerability and to depict my experience of living with grief. It’s me confronting the sense of displacement and the trauma experienced by my wife and me. At once, I have been in constant awe of the strength and resilience of my wife. Our bond has been fortified, and we have remained each other’s anchors whilst both continuing to process our new reality in different ways. This series is dedicated to my beautiful first child, Sadie, and my late sister, my best friend Bee.

You can find more details of my solo show, Habib Hajallie: Black & Blue via the link below.

Exhibition