Lebanese artist Dalia Baassiri is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work is deeply rooted in personal experience. Her art explores themes of domesticity, memory, and the traces of everyday life. She often uses elements from her environment that she describes as “vulnerable,” along with materials she finds suitable to express those elements.

Before starting any project, Baassiri dedicates time to researching and experimenting with materials and elements. For her project The Harvest, which includes 22 paintings – one of them When the Season Returns IV – she chose the name “The Harvest” to reflect her process of taking in what she sees around her and transforming it.

After the August 4th port explosion in Beirut, and following a seven-year break from painting to focus on sculpture, Baassiri began collecting various elements that eventually formed The Harvest. Among them were wall fragments from the Fayyad Building near the Beirut port, and burnt prayer candles from Harissa. These candles, deeply personal and symbolic, were mixed with her own melting candle which contained her personal hopes and dreams until the materials merged into one.

Trees, a recurring topic in The Harvest, entered the project after Baasiri observed that the trees in Mar Mikhael – a street heavily damaged in the explosion – remained strong and standing. This observation inspired her to use these natural elements to reflect Lebanon’s unstable condition. She further developed the idea by connecting the texture and visual identity of wall paint to the bark and surface of trees.

Baassiri uses these vulnerable elements to represent different textures of a tree. Wall paint fragments – delicate and requiring careful handling – were stitched onto organza fabric, known for being breathable and able to hold shape. These became the rough, rigid, and strong textures of tree branches. Melted prayer candles, used to express hopes and dreams, represented the resin that trees release as a healing response. Even the canvas itself was left untouched to highlight how vulnerability can stretch into resilience.

Baassiri describes her process as a form of building. She reflects through questions such as:

“Is vulnerability contagious? Do we end up becoming where we live? Does daily life in an unstable environment like Lebanon make us exceptionally familiar and inherently attracted to shreds and ruptures? Am I perpetually constructing a self-portrait through these clusters of broken pieces, or is this desire to preserve and merge a form of adaptation?”