I visited Laila Muraywid’s studio in Paris, it is the kind of place that rearranges your inner geography. A Syrian artist working between painting and sculpture, she creates objects that feel at once intimate yet cosmic, like relics from ancient times that pulse with contemporary pain and splendour.

I spent two hours there, but the visit felt like a brief lifetime. Her sculpted works are composed of different metals, ground, hair, sparkles, crystals and other unexpected materials; their surfaces catch the light like mirrored memories. The forms she fashions resemble ancient creatures, multifaceted, multilayered organisms stitched from invented history and imagination. Yet these are not mere fragments of the past, they speak as universal wounds, as if a fragment of the universe itself had been captured, wounded, healed, and then opened again.

Standing before her art creations, I felt goosebumps, I felt an uncomfortable yet very tender emotions, an uncertain register between beauty and intensity. I could not name the feeling precisely. All I knew was an irresistible urge to keep starring. 

The sculptures carry the sense of inherited pain, like wounds transmitted across generations, alongside a stubborn and luminous fantasy. Like if the ugliness of reality and the seduction of the imagination can coexist, braided and presented in a way I have rarely seen.

Muraywid’s paintings, too, echo this tension. Where her canvases employ colour and gesture, they showcase as atmospheric companions to the sculptural pieces. Together, the paintings and sculptures form a language that resists easy translation. The works tell stories beyond words, narratives that your soul can understand even if your vocabulary cannot.

What struck me most was the timelessness. These objects feel untied to any single era or history; they project emotions that seem to belong to an expansive human register rather than to a moment on a calendar. 

Though the visit lasted only a few hours, the impressions it left are continuing, an emotional deposit that feels like it could last an eternity.

I left Muraywid’s studio thirsty for more, eager to return to Paris, to re-enter that delicate space of feeling, and to imagine these pieces in a larger exhibition where their quiet, turning power could be shared with a wider audience. If there is a future moment in contemporary art when inherited trauma and abstract beauty are given equal weight, Laila Muraywid’s work will be waiting, patient, mysterious, and terribly compelling.

There, I felt the intense power of art to disturb and to comfort, to hurt and to heal, and to be contemporary while holding undetermined past, that is the essence of Laila’s sculptural work.