‘I keep moving,’ Candace Bahouth tells me, ‘I continue.’ Though now settled in Somerset, her artistic exploration has been ceaseless, infusing her work across forms with a highly dynamic energy. Born to a Lebanese-Palestinian father and an Italian mother, she grew up in the US, studying Fine Art at Syracuse University before England ‘seduced’ her; a rich alchemy of geography and heritage, mirroring the diversity of her oeuvre. Celebrated for her intricately detailed woven tapestry, she went on to make needlepoint her focus before concentrating on mosaic. Stitch by stitch, piece by piece, her reverence for each component - ‘a shard of china can be beautiful’ - speaks to both the rigour of her process and the wonder that propels it. 

Medieval Flowers Tapestry by Candace Bahouth

Though she has been creating for over forty years and two of her punk portraits are in the V&A, the notion of mastery is antithetical to her art, which continually deflates hierarchies, often with a deliciously infectious humour. Comedy can be cruel, but the comic note struck here is an irresistible combination of irreverence and awe. There is no haughty laughter behind it - and unless you take offence to smashing up commemorative china – 'I can do that because I’m an American’ - everyone is in on the joke. It’s an affectionate, connective teasing which probes what’s worthy of our attention - and who is worthy of status: it is the citizen looking in the mirror who finds themself in the centre after all; the royals are on the periphery. Elvis - no less worthy of a regal title in Candace’s hands - also features because, quite simply, ‘he is King!’. She has conjured her very own Royal Court - and her very own delightfully refreshing pantheon - the Egyptian sun god and Dionysus, political and cultural icons, all appear across her work with the same care and attention as the fairytale candlesticks built from towers of brightly coloured teacups. If there is an echo of Modernism in the jostling of high and low, of pastiche and classicism, it is a Modernism that has been cleansed of its ennui and found itself in Wonderland. The most likely artistic ghost, here, is Gaudi’s: ‘People must have thought he was crazy!’ she says, ‘breaking things apart and putting them together again.’ That she shares something of Gaudi’s spirit is undeniable: ‘he was just so joyous.’ It makes the question between creativity and originality seem redundant - pre-existing artefacts stimulate a new conversation: it is originality through creativity.

Like any aspect of her trajectory, her venture into mosaics wasn’t planned. Her study at Syracuse University offered a wealth of mediums to explore, but it was seeing a piece of blue and white china in the stream one day with her son that ushered in this stage of her career. What started with a mosaic windowsill has culminated in extravagant grottos (an extraordinary array of mosaic shoes, mirrors, and even drainpipes lie between). The grottos are ‘for feasting, foolery, and meditation.’ Mischief and play; tranquillity and solitude - of course Candace would conjure a space which might metamorphose depending on the eyes that see it, the senses which engage with it. And her art is to be engaged with – it is a place where the fantastical and the functional come together: ‘I want my art to have a purpose - I want people to be able to use it - and enjoy it, to be able to relate to it’. Inviting us to be part of it, freely creating our own associations and relationships with it - an inclusivity which seems particularly vital in an art world often dominated by works which alienate. 

‘Create with someone in mind,’ she advised the prisoners with whom she shared her needlepoint skills. I ask her if she creates with someone in mind. Other than the shoes, which are inflected with a sense of her mother’s elegance ('she wore high heels until she was ninety-one') and decorative eye, she creates with ‘the universe in mind’. She catches herself almost as soon as she says it, ‘that must sound ridiculous.’ Her capacity for enchantment with her materials and the sources which inspire her, coupled with her devotion to her practice, make it sound anything but ridiculous. There is a Blakean note to her vision - his grain of sand is her piece of shale. For Candace, the miraculous is right here - with the right kind of attention. She had a Catholic upbringing and while this was a profound influence, her sense of the divine doesn’t seem constrained by organised religious structures -‘I was telling my granddaughter that there is a bit of God in all of us - a bit of God in everything’- though, she insists, ‘I wasn’t a rebel.’ I suggest that there is, perhaps, a subtle rebellion in her art - in its refusal to buy into status or categorisation (‘I don’t identify my art’), its inherent dismissal of false binaries. The ordinary, spotlit, can be revealed as glorious. ‘Maybe,’ she says with a wry laugh.

It may be a quiet kind of rebellion, but with it comes a quiet power. I’m curious if she believes art has a capacity to usher in tangible shifts at a political and social level. She cites Banksy as an example of an artist who has effectively communicated protest both through his work and through his actions, but seems uncertain that hers can. And yet, she recently opened her garden to raise funds for the charity, Gaza Sunbirds. ‘I want the people of Gaza and the West Bank to know that there are people who care. The war is a hopeless cause, but we can support those that are supporting them.’   

Given that her garden is a place of refuge it seems she is very much part of supporting that shift, both in practical and symbolic terms. Equally valuable is the fact this garden is populated by art whose connective tissue is the spirit of joy (flamingos perch beneath lollipop shaped trees with lilac-pink trunks), harmony (‘the garden is very low, so I built high’ she says, referring to the totems and exquisite mosaiced obelisks), and, most crucially, love (strings of plastic hearts dangle just beyond her studio). And isn’t the very nature of the process - in which each fragment and stitch is essential to the whole - deeply resonant with what equality within the collective might look like? Suffering is so often met with expressions of pity, but this offers another possibility: meeting suffering with the affirmation of life.